Algorithms and Software for Automatic Detection of Speech Disfluencies in an Audio Signal

During automatic speech processing a number of problems appear, and among them are such as speech variation and different kinds of speech disfluences. In this article different types of speech disfluencies and their causes are presented, as well as the algorithm for their automatic detection based on the analysis of acoustical parameters. The method of cross-correlation was used to deteсt voiced hesitation phenomena and a method of band-filtering was used to detect unvoiced hesitation phenomena and artefacts. The experiments were performed on a specially collected corpus of spontaneous Russian map-task and appointment-task dialogs. Experiments showed that voiced hesitation phenomena are detected with 80