An automated assessment framework for atypical prosody and stereotyped idiosyncratic phrases related to autism spectrum disorder.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), a neurodevelopmental disability, has become one of the high incidence diseases among children. Studies indicate that early diagnosis and intervention treatments help to achieve positive longitudinal outcomes. In this paper, we focus on the speech and language abnormalities of young children with ASD and present an automated assessment framework in quantifying atypical prosody and stereotyped idiosyncratic phrases related to ASD. For detecting atypical prosody from speech, we propose both the hand-crafted feature based method as well as the end-to-end deep learning framework. First, we use the OpenSMILE toolkit to extract utterance level high dimensional acoustic features followed by a support vector machine (SVM) backend as the conventional baseline. Second, we propose several end-to-end deep neural network setups and configurations to model the atypical prosody label directly from the constant Q transform spectrogram of speech. Third, we apply cross-validation on the training data to perform segments selection and enhance the subject level classification performance. Fourth, we fuse the deep learning based methods with the conventional baseline at the score level to further enhance the overall system performance. For detecting the stereotyped idiosyncratic usage of words or phrases from speech transcripts, we adopt language model, dependency treebank and Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency (TF–IDF) in addition to Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software (LIWC) methods to extract a set of text features followed by a standard SVM backend. We collect a database of spontaneous Mandarin speech recorded during the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) Module 2 and Module 3 sessions. The Module 2 part consists of 118 children while the Module 3 part includes 71 children. Experimental results on this database show that our proposed methods can effectively predict the atypical prosody and stereotyped idiosyncratic phrases codes for young children with the risk of ASD. On the two categories classification task, the unweighted accuracy of the aforementioned two tasks are 88.1% and 77.8%, respectively.