Nonlinear, Biophysically-Informed Speech Pathology Detection

This paper reports a simple nonlinear approach to online acoustic speech pathology detection for automatic screening purposes. Straightforward linear preprocessing followed by two nonlinear measures, based parsimoniously upon the biophysics of speech production, combined with subsequent linear classification, achieves an overall normal/pathological detection performance of 91.4%, and over 99% with rejection of 15% ambiguous cases. This compares favourably with more complex, computationally intensive methods based on a large number of linear and other measures. This demonstrates that nonlinear approaches to speech pathology detection, informed by biophysics, can be both simple and robust, and are amenable to implementation as online algorithms