Identification of primary and collateral tracks in stuttered speech

Abstract: Disfluent speech has been previously addressed from two main perspectives: the clinical perspective focusing on diagnostic, and the NLP perspective aiming at modeling these events and detect them for downstream tasks. In addition, previous works often used different metrics depending on whether the input features are text or speech, making it difficult to compare the different contributions. Here, we introduce a new evaluation framework for disfluency detection inspired by the clinical and NLP perspective together with the theory of performance from \cite{clark1996using} which distinguishes between primary and collateral tracks. We introduce a novel forced-aligned disfluency dataset from a corpus of semi-directed interviews, and present baseline results directly comparing the performance of text-based features (word and span information) and speech-based (acoustic-prosodic information). Finally, we introduce new audio features inspired by the word-based span features. We show experimentally that using these features outperformed the baselines for speech-based predictions on the present dataset.