Noise Be Gone: Does Speech Enhancement Distort Linguistic Nuances?

Iñigo Parra


Abstract
This study evaluates the impact of speech enhancement (SE) techniques on linguistic research, focusing on their ability to maintain essential acoustic characteristics in enhanced audio without introducing significant artifacts. Through a sociophonetic analysis of Peninsular and Peruvian Spanish speakers, using both original and enhanced recordings, we demonstrate that SE effectively preserves critical speech nuances such as voicing and vowel quality. This supports the use of SE in improving the quality of speech samples. This study marks an initial effort to assess SE’s reliability in language studies and proposes a methodology for enhancing low-quality audio corpora of under-resourced languages.
Anthology ID:
2024.fieldmatters-1.7
Volume:
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on NLP Applications to Field Linguistics (Field Matters 2024)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Oleg Serikov, Ekaterina Voloshina, Anna Postnikova, Saliha Muradoglu, Eric Le Ferrand, Elena Klyachko, Ekaterina Vylomova, Tatiana Shavrina, Francis Tyers
Venues:
FieldMatters | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
52–60
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.fieldmatters-1.7
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Iñigo Parra. 2024. Noise Be Gone: Does Speech Enhancement Distort Linguistic Nuances?. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on NLP Applications to Field Linguistics (Field Matters 2024), pages 52–60, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Noise Be Gone: Does Speech Enhancement Distort Linguistic Nuances? (Parra, FieldMatters-WS 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.fieldmatters-1.7.pdf