Publications
>
Article

Improving aphasic speech recognition by using novel semi-supervised learning methods on aphasiabank for English and Spanish

Publicated to:Applied Sciences-Basel. 11 (19): - 2021-10-01 11(19), DOI: 10.3390/app11198872

Authors: Torre IG; Romero M; Álvarez A

Affiliations

Abstract

Automatic speech recognition in patients with aphasia is a challenging task for which studies have been published in a few languages. Reasonably, the systems reported in the literature within this field show significantly lower performance than those focused on transcribing non-pathological clean speech. It is mainly due to the difficulty of recognizing a more unintelligible voice, as well as due to the scarcity of annotated aphasic data. This work is mainly focused on applying novel semi-supervised learning methods to the AphasiaBank dataset in order to deal with these two major issues, reporting improvements for the English language and providing the first benchmark for the Spanish language for which less than one hour of transcribed aphasic speech was used for training. In addition, the influence of reinforcing the training and decoding processes with out-of-domain acoustic and text data is described by using different strategies and configurations to fine-tune the hyperparameters and the final recognition systems. The interesting results obtained encourage extending this technological approach to other languages and scenarios where the scarcity of annotated data to train recognition models is a challenging reality.

Keywords

AphasiaAphasiabankLow-resourceSemi-supervised learningSpeech recognitionWav2vec2.0

Quality index

Bibliometric impact. Analysis of the contribution and dissemination channel

The work has been published in the journal Applied Sciences-Basel due to its progression and the good impact it has achieved in recent years, according to the agency WoS (JCR), it has become a reference in its field. In the year of publication of the work, 2021, it was in position 39/92, thus managing to position itself as a Q2 (Segundo Cuartil), in the category Engineering, Multidisciplinary. Notably, the journal is positioned en el Cuartil Q2 para la agencia Scopus (SJR) en la categoría Engineering (Miscellaneous).

From a relative perspective, and based on the normalized impact indicator calculated from World Citations from Scopus Elsevier, it yields a value for the Field-Weighted Citation Impact from the Scopus agency: 1.9, which indicates that, compared to works in the same discipline and in the same year of publication, it ranks as a work cited above average. (source consulted: ESI Nov 14, 2024)

This information is reinforced by other indicators of the same type, which, although dynamic over time and dependent on the set of average global citations at the time of their calculation, consistently position the work at some point among the top 50% most cited in its field:

  • Field Citation Ratio (FCR) from Dimensions: 11.39 (source consulted: Dimensions Jun 2025)

Specifically, and according to different indexing agencies, this work has accumulated citations as of 2025-06-15, the following number of citations:

  • Scopus: 26
  • OpenCitations: 17

Impact and social visibility

From the perspective of influence or social adoption, and based on metrics associated with mentions and interactions provided by agencies specializing in calculating the so-called "Alternative or Social Metrics," we can highlight as of 2025-06-15:

  • The use, from an academic perspective evidenced by the Altmetric agency indicator referring to aggregations made by the personal bibliographic manager Mendeley, gives us a total of: 42.
  • The use of this contribution in bookmarks, code forks, additions to favorite lists for recurrent reading, as well as general views, indicates that someone is using the publication as a basis for their current work. This may be a notable indicator of future more formal and academic citations. This claim is supported by the result of the "Capture" indicator, which yields a total of: 42 (PlumX).

With a more dissemination-oriented intent and targeting more general audiences, we can observe other more global scores such as:

  • The Total Score from Altmetric: 2.6.
  • The number of mentions on the social network X (formerly Twitter): 4 (Altmetric).

It is essential to present evidence supporting full alignment with institutional principles and guidelines on Open Science and the Conservation and Dissemination of Intellectual Heritage. A clear example of this is:

  • The work has been submitted to a journal whose editorial policy allows open Open Access publication.

Leadership analysis of institutional authors

There is a significant leadership presence as some of the institution’s authors appear as the first or last signer, detailed as follows: First Author (GONZALEZ TORRE, IVAN) .

the author responsible for correspondence tasks has been GONZALEZ TORRE, IVAN.