Towards estimation of Japanese intelligibility scores using objective voice quality assessment measures
Rui Kaga, Kazuhiro Kondo, Kiyoshi Nakagawa, Masaya Fuzimori · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2006
We investigated the use of objective quality measures to estimate the intelligibility of Japanese speech. We initially focused on PESQ (perceptual evaluation of speech quality), which is the state-of-the-art objective assessment method, and can estimate the mean opinion scores (MOS) at an extremely high accuracy. Since we can assume that speech quality is correlated with intelligibility, it should be possible to estimate the intelligibility from the estimated opinion scores or some of its derivatives. We tried to estimate the intelligibility of the Japanese Rhyme Test (DRT). The DRT uses minimal word pairs whose initial phone differs by one phonetic feature. We estimated the MOS of the DRT word samples mixed with noise and tried to correlate this with the measured intelligibility. However, the estimated MOS showed no difference between phonetic features. However, the difference in the estimated MOS between the word pairs seems to differ by a phonetic feature for SNR above 10 dB, which suggests that the estimation of intelligibility by a phonetic feature may be possible. We also plan to selectively use the internal data used to calculate the MOS estimate for better intelligibility estimation.