# Quantifying the effect of speech pathology on automatic and human speaker verification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.06208 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06208/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jun 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [ClaritySpeech: Dementia Obfuscation in Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09282/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This study investigates how surgical intervention for speech pathology (specifically, as a result of oral cancer surgery) impacts the performance of an automatic speaker verification (ASV) system. Using two recently collected Dutch datasets with parallel pre and post-surgery audio from the same speaker, NKI-OC-VC and SPOKE, we assess the extent to which speech pathology influences ASV performance, and whether objective/subjective measures of speech severity are correlated with the performance. Finally, we carry out a perceptual study to compare judgements of ASV and human listeners. Our findings reveal that pathological speech negatively affects ASV performance, and the severity of the speech is negatively correlated with the performance. There is a moderate agreement in perceptual and objective scores of speaker similarity and severity, however, we could not clearly establish in the perceptual study, whether the same phenomenon also exists in human perception.