# Disfluency Detection using a Bidirectional LSTM

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.03209 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03209/

## Key facts

- Cited by 31 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 12 Apr 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Disfl-QA: A Benchmark Dataset for Understanding Disfluencies in Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04016/) (2021)
- [Machine Learning for Stuttering Identification: Review, Challenges and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.04057/) (2021)
- [Disfluency Detection with Unlabeled Data and Small BERT Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10769/) (2021)
- [Lost in Transcription: Identifying and Quantifying the Accuracy Biases of Automatic Speech Recognition Systems Against Disfluent Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06150/) (2024)
- [Teaching BERT to Wait: Balancing Accuracy and Latency for Streaming Disfluency Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00620/) (2022)
- [TOD-DA: Towards Boosting the Robustness of Task-oriented Dialogue Modeling on Spoken Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12441/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models for Dysfluency Detection in Stuttered Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11025/) (2024)
- [Analysis and Evaluation of Synthetic Data Generation in Speech Dysfluency Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22029/) (2025)
- [LARD: Large-scale Artificial Disfluency Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05041/) (2022)
- [Introducing Rhetorical Parallelism Detection: A New Task with Datasets, Metrics, and Baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00100/) (2023)
- [Automatic Disfluency Detection from Untranscribed Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00867/) (2023)
- [Span Classification with Structured Information for Disfluency Detection in Spoken Utterances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16028/) (2022)
- [Four-in-One: A Joint Approach to Inverse Text Normalization, Punctuation, Capitalization, and Disfluency for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15063/) (2022)
- [Advancing Stuttering Detection via Data Augmentation, Class-Balanced Loss and Multi-Contextual Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11343/) (2023)
- [Dysfluent WFST: A Framework for Zero-Shot Speech Dysfluency Transcription and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16351/) (2025)
- [Adversarial Training For Low-Resource Disfluency Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06384/) (2023)
- [From Disfluency Detection to Intent Detection and Slot Filling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08359/) (2022)
- [MultiTurnCleanup: A Benchmark for Multi-Turn Spoken Conversational Transcript Cleanup](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12029/) (2023)
- [Conversational Speech Reveals Structural Robustness Failures in SpeechLLM Backbones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20321/) (2025)
- [Artificial Disfluency Detection, Uh No, Disfluency Generation for the Masses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09235/) (2022)
- [A novel multimodal dynamic fusion network for disfluency detection in spoken utterances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14700/) (2022)
- [DISCO: A Large Scale Human Annotated Corpus for Disfluency Correction in Indo-European Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16749/) (2023)
- [Z-Scores: A Metric for Linguistically Assessing Disfluency Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20319/) (2025)
- [Mind the Pause: Disfluency-Aware Objective Tuning for Multilingual Speech Correction with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12242/) (2026)
- [FormalASR: End-to-End Spoken Chinese to Formal Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19266/) (2026)
- [5IDER: Unified Query Rewriting for Steering, Intent Carryover, Disfluencies, Entity Carryover and Repair](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01855/) (2023)
- [Looks can be Deceptive: Distinguishing Repetition Disfluency from Reduplication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08147/) (2024)
- [MMSD-Net: Towards Multi-modal Stuttering Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11492/) (2024)
- [DRIVE: Disfluency-Rich Synthetic Dialog Data Generation Framework for Intelligent Vehicle Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19867/) (2025)
- [An Encoder-Integrated PhoBERT with Graph Attention for Vietnamese Token-Level Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11537/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce a new approach for disfluency detection using a Bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory neural network (BLSTM). In addition to the word sequence, the model takes as input pattern match features that were developed to reduce sensitivity to vocabulary size in training, which lead to improved performance over the word sequence alone. The BLSTM takes advantage of explicit repair states in addition to the standard reparandum states. The final output leverages integer linear programming to incorporate constraints of disfluency structure. In experiments on the Switchboard corpus, the model achieves state-of-the-art performance for both the standard disfluency detection task and the correction detection task. Analysis shows that the model has better detection of non-repetition disfluencies, which tend to be much harder to detect.