# Exploring Pathological Speech Quality Assessment with ASR-Powered Wav2Vec2 in Data-Scarce Context

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.20184 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20184/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [On Large-Batch Training for Deep Learning: Generalization Gap and Sharp Minima](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04836/) (2016)
- [SpeechBrain: A General-Purpose Speech Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04624/) (2021)
- [Layer-wise Analysis of a Self-supervised Speech Representation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.04734/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10643/) (2022)
- [Attentive Statistics Pooling for Deep Speaker Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10963/) (2018)
- [Evidence of Vocal Tract Articulation in Self-Supervised Learning of Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11723/) (2022)
- [Investigating Self-supervised Pretraining Frameworks for Pathological Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15431/) (2022)
- [Exploring Self-supervised Pre-trained ASR Models For Dysarthric and Elderly Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14564/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Exploring ASR-Based Wav2Vec2 for Automated Speech Disorder Assessment: Insights and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08250/) (2024)
- [JSQA: Speech Quality Assessment with Perceptually-Inspired Contrastive Pretraining Based on JND Audio Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11636/) (2025)
- [Development and multi-center evaluation of domain-adapted speech recognition for human-AI teaming in real-world gastrointestinal endoscopy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01705/) (2026)
- [Transcribing Children's Speech: ASR Performance and Obtaining Reliable Orthographic Transcriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28833/) (2026)
- [What Does a Pathological Speech Assessment Model Know about Acoustic Features? A Case Study on Oral and Oropharyngeal Cancer Patients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24949/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automatic speech quality assessment has raised more attention as an alternative or support to traditional perceptual clinical evaluation. However, most research so far only gains good results on simple tasks such as binary classification, largely due to data scarcity. To deal with this challenge, current works tend to segment patients' audio files into many samples to augment the datasets. Nevertheless, this approach has limitations, as it indirectly relates overall audio scores to individual segments. This paper introduces a novel approach where the system learns at the audio level instead of segments despite data scarcity. This paper proposes to use the pre-trained Wav2Vec2 architecture for both SSL, and ASR as feature extractor in speech assessment. Carried out on the HNC dataset, our ASR-driven approach established a new baseline compared with other approaches, obtaining average MSE=0.73 and MSE=1.15 for the prediction of intelligibility and severity scores respectively, using only 95 training samples. It shows that the ASR based Wav2Vec2 model brings the best results and may indicate a strong correlation between ASR and speech quality assessment. We also measure its ability on variable segment durations and speech content, exploring factors influencing its decision.