Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2609.03982

Fairness Evaluation of Edge-AI Implementation for Cleft Lip and Palate Speech ASR

Susmita Bhattacharjee·Himashri Deka·H. S. Shekhawat·S. R. M. Prasanna
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) remains challenging for individuals with cleft lip and palate (CLP) because of limited pathological speech data and large variations in speech characteristics across speakers and severity levels. These recognition difficulties can reduce the accessibility of voice-based human-computer interaction, particularly when cloud-based ASR services are unavailable or unreliable. This work investigates a severity-aware and edge-deployable ASR framework for improving recognition of CLP speech using Whisper-small. The model was fine-tuned using different combinations of normal and CLP speech representing mild, moderate, and severe conditions, together with a CLP-only training configuration, to examine how the inclusion of different severity levels influences recognition performance and fairness across speakers. The pretrained model produced pooled word error rate (WER) and phoneme error rate (PER) values of 62.46% and 52.72%, respectively. Severity-aware fine-tuning substantially improved performance, reducing the best pooled WER to 22.72% and the best pooled PER to 18.44%. Training with a broader representation of CLP severity levels also provided the best overall balance between recognition accuracy and performance consistency across severity groups. Deployment on an NVIDIA Jetson platform demonstrated real-time inference for all fine-tuned models, with real-time factors of 0.167-0.171 and peak GPU memory usage of approximately 566 MB. The results demonstrate that incorporating severity diversity during ASR adaptation can substantially improve recognition of CLP speech while reducing performance disparities across severity groups. The proposed approach further enables low-latency, Internet-independent speech interaction on edge devices, supporting more accessible and inclusive voice-based human-computer interaction for individuals with CLP.

Explore related subjects

eess.AS

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Susmita Bhattacharjee, Himashri Deka, H. S. Shekhawat, S. R. M. Prasanna. 2026-09-03. Fairness Evaluation of Edge-AI Implementation for Cleft Lip and Palate Speech ASR. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.03982

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

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Deep Filter Estimation from Inter-Frame Correlations for Monaural Speech Dereverberation

Speech dereverberation with a distant microphone is challenging because reverberation is correlated with the target speech, and models trained on simulated data often generalize poorly to real recordings. We propose IF-CorrNet, a correlation-to-filter architecture for monaural dereverberation. Instead of feeding raw complex STFT coefficients to the network, IF-CorrNet computes inter-frame correlations among neighboring frames at each time-frequency bin and estimates multi-frame deep filters from these features with a dual-path Transformer backbone. This design makes inter-frame dependencies explicit at the network input while retaining a multi-frame filtering output, a pairing motivated by the normal equation of linear multi-frame filtering. On the REVERB Challenge corpus, IF-CorrNet achieves the best CD, LLR, SNRfw, and PESQ among the compared dereverberation baselines on SimData, and the highest SRMR among the compared systems on RealData. The ablation shows higher RealData SRMR with correlation inputs for both filtering and masking, with filtering adding a further gain.

eess.AS↗
arXiv2026

Recovering the Zipfian Distribution in Unsupervised Term Discovery

Unsupervised term discovery involves segmenting unlabelled speech into word- or syllable-like units and clustering these into a lexicon of candidate types. True lexicons follow a Zipfian distribution, yet the dominant centre-based clustering approach -- K-means -- produces a more uniform distribution due to an inductive bias toward spherical clusters. In this paper we revisit graph-based clustering as a bottom-up alternative, where segment embeddings are connected by pairwise similarity and partitioned using the Leiden algorithm. We show that graph clustering substantially outperforms centre-based approaches (K-means, GMM, BIRCH) in both word- and syllable-level lexicon discovery across three languages, producing more Zipf-like distributions. Another bottom-up approach, agglomerative clustering with average linkage, also performs well, although it is computationally less efficient and allows for less control over the resulting distribution. Our work calls into question the dominance of centre-based clustering for term discovery, and promotes graph clustering as an attractive alternative.

eess.AS↗
arXiv2026

CHILDES-Aligned: A Curated Children's Speech Dataset via Multi-Model Timestamp Ensembling

CHILDES is a large-scale child speech corpus containing long-form recordings of naturalistic child-adult interactions, making it a valuable resource for studying child speech and language development. However, utterance-level timestamps provided in this corpus are often noisy, incomplete, or misaligned with the audio. As a result, utterances cannot always be reliably localized within long recordings, which limits the direct use of these data for training and evaluating speech models. In this work, we propose BEACON (Boundary Estimation via Alignment CONsensus), an ensemble timestamp-curation framework that refines utterance-level timestamps by aggregating knowledge from multiple off-the-shelf ASR models. Specifically, each model's word-level timestamp predictions are first aligned to provided human transcripts, and the final utterance time boundaries are determined by a consensus voting strategy. The framework is corpus-agnostic and applies to any long-form recording paired with a trusted transcript whose timestamps are unreliable or missing, offering a general recipe for timestamp curation. Leveraging this pipeline, we curate and release a 413-hour general-purpose child-speech dataset with corrected utterance-level timestamps, together with a 283-hour quality-controlled subset for ASR training. Fine-tuning on this subset yields up to an average 19.5% relative WER reduction on four out-of-domain child-speech benchmarks.

eess.AS↗