US-based Method for Speech Reception Threshold Measurement in French

Alexander Raake, Brian FG Katz


Abstract
We propose a new method for measuring the threshold of 50% sentence intelligibility in noisy or multi-source speech communication situations (Speech Reception Threshold, SRT). Our SRT-test complements those available e.g. for English, German, Dutch, Swedish and Finnish by a French test method. The approach we take is based on semantically unpredictable sentences (SUS), which can principally be created for various languages. This way, the proposed method enables better cross-language comparisons of intelligibility tests. As a starting point for the French language, a set of 288 sentences (24 lists of 12 sentences each) was created. Each of the 24 lists is optimized for homogeneity in terms of phoneme-distribution as compared to average French, and for word occurrence frequency of the employed monosyllabic keywords as derived from French language databases. Based on the optimized text material, a speech target sentence database has been recorded with a trained speaker. A test calibration was carried out to yield uniform measurement results over the set of target sentences. First intelligibility measurements show good reliability of the method.
Anthology ID:
L06-1463
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06)
Month:
May
Year:
2006
Address:
Genoa, Italy
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Aldo Gangemi, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2006/pdf/744_pdf.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alexander Raake and Brian FG Katz. 2006. US-based Method for Speech Reception Threshold Measurement in French. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06), Genoa, Italy. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
US-based Method for Speech Reception Threshold Measurement in French (Raake & Katz, LREC 2006)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2006/pdf/744_pdf.pdf