# Paediatric-HGNN: A Hybrid Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network for Detecting Disfluency in Children's Speech via Multiscale Acoustic Fusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.08210 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08210/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [SEP-28k: A Dataset for Stuttering Event Detection From Podcasts With People Who Stutter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12394/) (2021)
- [Detecting Multiple Speech Disfluencies using a Deep Residual Network with Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12590/) (2019)
- [Controllable Time-Delay Transformer for Real-Time Punctuation Prediction and Disfluency Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01309/) (2020)
- [StutterNet: Stuttering Detection Using Time Delay Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05599/) (2021)
- [StutterCut: Uncertainty-Guided Normalised Cut for Dysfluency Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02255/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automated stuttering detection (ASD) systems struggle with paediatric speech due to high acoustic variability in developing voices and the subtle distinction between pathological stuttering and typical developmental disfluencies. We introduce Paediatric-HGNN, a framework using a Context-aware Part-whole Interaction Network (CaPIN) tailored for paediatric data. Instead of conventional 1D signal modelling, our approach builds a heterogeneous graph capturing hierarchical relationships between lexical units (word nodes) and fine-grained acoustic segments (frame nodes). Trained on curated paediatric corpora (UCLASS and FluencyBank), Paediatric-HGNN achieves 82.4% weighted accuracy and a Typical Disfluency F1-score of 0.386. Modelling hierarchical lexical-acoustic interactions captures developmental "searching" behaviour, offering a more robust and interpretable tool for early clinical intervention.