Multilingual Aphasia Speech Analysis with Machine Learning

Aphasia is an acquired language disorder that occurs after brain injury such as stroke, head trauma or tumor. People with aphasia (PWA) may have trouble speaking or understanding speech. If diagnosed early, aphasia is often treatable, and the communication can be improved with speech therapy. Early detection and evaluation of aphasia is crucial for the treatment and recovery. This paper reports a preliminary study of multilingual aphasia speech evaluation. In this study, the characteristics of speech from PWA and healthy controls are compared from both acoustic and linguistic perspectives. Multiple acoustic features are extracted from aphasic and normal speech to build a language independent aphasic speech detection model. The model achieved good aphasic speech detection performance on both English and Mandarin test sets.