Machine Learning Based Automated Speech Dialog Analysis Of Autistic Children

Abstract

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have altered behaviors in communication, social interaction, and activity, out of which communication has been the most prominent disorder among many. Despite the recent technological advances, limited attention has been given to screening and diagnosing ASD by identifying the speech deficiencies (SD) of autistic children at early stages. This research focuses on bridging the gap in ASD screening by developing an automated system to distinguish autistic traits through speech analysis. Data was collected from 40 participants for the initial analysis and recordings were obtained from 17 participants. We considered a three-stage processing system; first stage utilizes thresholding for silence detection and Vocal Activity Detection for vocal isolation, second stage adopts machine learning technique neural network with frequency domain representations in developing a reliant utterance classifier for the isolated vocals and stage three also adopts machine learning technique neural network in recognizing autistic traits in speech patterns of the classified utterances. The results are promising in identifying SD of autistic children with the utterance classifier having 78% accuracy and pattern recognition 72% accuracy.

Voice as a Biomarker of Pediatric Health: A Scoping Review

“…Acoustic features [13][14][15] and phonetic features [16] were extracted to train machine learning algorithms in classifying children with intellectual disabilities. A majority of the included studies centered on training machine learning algorithms to classify children with autism spectrum disorder (and Down Syndrome [9]) using acoustic features [9,[17][18][19][20][21], vocal features [22,23], voice prosody features [24], pre-linguistic vocal features [25], and speech features [26,27]. In particular, Wu et al (2019) [21] focused on acoustic features of crying sounds in children of 2 to 3 years of age, while Pokorny et al (2017) [28] concentrated on pre-linguistic vocal features in 10-month-old babies.…”

“…Miodonska 2016 [60] Szklanny 2019 [70] Woloshuk 2018 [61] Singapore [2] Balamurali 2021 [52] Hee 2019 [46] South Korea [2] Lee 2020 [19] Lee 2022 [20] Sri Lanka [2] Kariyawasam 2019 [32] Wijesinghe 2019 [27] Sweden [1] Pokorny 2017 [28] Turkey [1] Satar 2022 [38] United Kingdom [1] Alharbi 2018 [51] USA [12] Asgari 2021 [22] Chi 2022 [26] Cho 2019 [17] Ji 2021 [35] Ji 2019 [36] MacFarlane 2022 [23] Manigault 2022 [67] McGinnis 2019 [63] Onu 2019 [37] Sadeghian 2015 [49] Suthar 2022 [50] VanDam 2015 [58] Appendix C…”

“…A table listing the condition group and condition type being analyzed by each study included in the scoping review and their associated reference number. Chi 2022 [26] Cho 2019 [17] Deng 2017 [18] Jayasree 2021 [9] Lee 2020 [19] Lee 2022 [20] MacFarlane 2022 [23] Nakai 2017 [24] Pokorny 2017 [28] Wijesinghe 2019 [27] Wu 2019 [21] Dyslexia Kariyawasam 2019 [32] Ribeiro 2020 [33] Intellectual Disability…”

Towards physician's experience: Development of machine learning model for the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorders based on complex T‐spherical fuzzy‐weighted zero‐inconsistency method

“…Although ASD contemplates are generally clinical and biological, the ongoing technological advances in ML have made information‐driven logical investigations a typical supplement. In addition, a prediction model based on ML techniques can support ASD diagnosis procedures 14–16 . However, the ML analyst should first determine the level of preprocessing required for the given dataset known as the data preprocessing techniques, which can be used for data mining.…”

“…In addition, a prediction model based on ML techniques can support ASD diagnosis procedures. [14][15][16] However, the ML analyst should first determine the level of preprocessing required for the given dataset known as the data preprocessing techniques, which can be used for data mining. Current techniques provided in data preprocessing and how they can be promoted?…”