An Early Study on Intelligent Analysis of Speech under COVID-19: Severity, Sleep Quality, Fatigue, and Anxiety

Jing Han; Kun Qian; Meishu Song; Zijiang Yang; Zhao Ren; Shuo Liu; Juan Liu; Huaiyuan Zheng; Wei Ji; Tomoya Koike; Xiao Li; Zixing Zhang; Yoshiharu Yamamoto; Björn W. Schuller

arXiv · 2005.00096

An Early Study on Intelligent Analysis of Speech under COVID-19: Severity, Sleep Quality, Fatigue, and Anxiety

Jing Han·Kun Qian·Meishu Song·Zijiang Yang·Zhao Ren·Shuo Liu·Juan Liu·Huaiyuan Zheng·Wei Ji·Tomoya Koike·Xiao Li·Zixing Zhang·Yoshiharu Yamamoto·Björn W. Schuller

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

The COVID-19 outbreak was announced as a global pandemic by the World Health Organisation in March 2020 and has affected a growing number of people in the past few weeks. In this context, advanced artificial intelligence techniques are brought to the fore in responding to fight against and reduce the impact of this global health crisis. In this study, we focus on developing some potential use-cases of intelligent speech analysis for COVID-19 diagnosed patients. In particular, by analysing speech recordings from these patients, we construct audio-only-based models to automatically categorise the health state of patients from four aspects, including the severity of illness, sleep quality, fatigue, and anxiety. For this purpose, two established acoustic feature sets and support vector machines are utilised. Our experiments show that an average accuracy of .69 obtained estimating the severity of illness, which is derived from the number of days in hospitalisation. We hope that this study can foster an extremely fast, low-cost, and convenient way to automatically detect the COVID-19 disease.

Explore related subjects

eess.AS cs.CL cs.SD

Keep this discovery

BibTeX RIS

Jing Han, Kun Qian, Meishu Song, Zijiang Yang, Zhao Ren, Shuo Liu, Juan Liu, Huaiyuan Zheng, Wei Ji, Tomoya Koike, Xiao Li, Zixing Zhang, Yoshiharu Yamamoto, Björn W. Schuller. 2020-04-30. An Early Study on Intelligent Analysis of Speech under COVID-19: Severity, Sleep Quality, Fatigue, and Anxiety. https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.00096

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Diarization Error Decomposition Under Pause Annotation Ambiguity

Speaker diarization evaluation is sensitive to ambiguity in pause annotation, which can inflate diarization error rate (DER) or obscure genuine model errors. We show that morphological closing, which has been used for pause-tolerant diarization evaluation, discards segment-level distinctions. Instead, we propose an exact, overlap-aware decomposition of standard DER into a pause-attributable component, consisting of errors compatible with pause filling, and a residual core component that can serve as a proxy for intrinsic diarization errors. The decomposition leaves DER unchanged, while the pause-attributable and core components vary monotonically with the pause threshold and eventually saturate. Experiments spanning synthetic transformations, annotation mismatch, cross-domain evaluation, and tight-boundary diarization show that the decomposition reveals error sources not apparent from standard DER.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2026

Less can be More: What Aspects of Speech Drive End-of-Turn Detection

In conversational AI, detecting when a speaker has finished talking is crucial for natural turn taking. While recent work incorporates semantics, the relative contribution of different modalities remains unclear. We present a controlled ablation of acoustic, prosodic, and semantic signals for streaming end of turn detection using a lightweight trimodal classifier. Under identical training conditions, the acoustic prosodic combination achieves the best balance of accuracy and latency, achieving utterance F1 of 0.93 with 7.8% false alarms at 400ms median latency. Adding text increases premature detections without improving performance. Feature space analysis confirms that prosodic features have the strongest class separability, while text representations overlap substantially. These findings suggest that turn-taking is primarily conveyed through intonation and silence patterns rather than semantic completeness, enabling faster and more reliable systems without expensive text inference.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2026

Downstream-Task-Aware Unified Source Separation

Task-aware unified source separation (TUSS) enables a single model to handle diverse separation tasks by conditioning on input prompts. However, conventional TUSS does not account for downstream task requirements, such as whether the enhanced speech will be used for human listening or automatic speech recognition (ASR). In this paper, we propose a prompt extension framework for TUSS that incorporates downstream task information into the input prompts and switches the loss function according to the given prompt during training, enabling outputs with different signal characteristics at inference time. Specifically, we introduce an ASR-dedicated prompt paired with a regularized loss function that reduces speech artifacts to improve ASR robustness, while the standard prompt is paired with the conventional SNR loss function. Experiments on the LibriSpeech and JNAS corpora demonstrate that the proposed joint-training scheme enables a single model to improve ASR performance over noisy input across a wide range of SNR conditions by selecting the ASR-dedicated prompt, while maintaining general speech enhancement quality when the standard prompt is used.

eess.AS↗