Evaluating the Intelligibility Benefits of Neural Speech Enrichment for Listeners with Normal Hearing and Hearing Impairment using the Greek Harvard Corpus

TL;DR

This study evaluates a neural speech enhancement model called wSSDRC using Greek speech data, demonstrating significant intelligibility improvements for both normal hearing and hearing impaired listeners in noisy conditions.

Contribution

The paper provides a comprehensive evaluation of the neural speech booster wSSDRC on Greek speech, extending previous English-based tests to Greek listeners and noise conditions.

Findings

Median intelligibility boost of 39% for normal hearing listeners.

Median intelligibility boost of 38% for hearing impaired listeners.

Effective performance of wSSDRC in Greek speech enhancement in noisy environments.

Abstract

In this work we evaluate a neural based speech intelligibility booster based on spectral shaping and dynamic range compression (SSDRC), referred to as WaveNet-based SSDRC (wSSDRC), using a recently designed Greek Harvard-style corpus. The corpus has been developed according to the format of the Harvard/IEEE sentences and offers the opportunity to apply neural speech enhancement models and examine their performance gain for Greek listeners. wSSDRC has been successfully tested for English material and speakers in the past. In this paper we revisit wSSDRC to perform a full scale evaluation of the model with Greek listeners under the condition of equal energy before and after modification. Both normal hearing (NH) and hearing impaired (HI) listeners evaluated the model under speech shaped noise (SSN) at listener-specific SNRs matching their Speech Reception Threshold (SRT) - a point at which 50 % of unmodified speech is intelligible. The analysis statistics show that the wSSDRC model has produced a median intelligibility boost of 39% for NH and 38% for HI, relative to the plain unprocessed speech.