The Post-Stroke Speech Transcription (PSST) Challenge

We present the outcome of the Post-Stroke Speech Transcription (PSST) challenge. For the challenge, we prepared a new data resource of responses to two confrontation naming tests found in AphasiaBank, extracting audio and adding new phonemic transcripts for each response. The challenge consisted of two tasks. Task A asked challengers to build an automatic speech recognizer (ASR) for phonemic transcription of the PSST samples, evaluated in terms of phoneme error rate (PER) as well as a finer-grained metric derived from phonological feature theory, feature error rate (FER). The best model had a 9.9% FER / 20.0% PER, improving on our baseline by a relative 18% and 24%, respectively. Task B approximated a downstream assessment task, asking challengers to identify whether each recording contained a correctly pronounced target word. Challengers were unable to improve on the baseline algorithm; however, using this algorithm with the improved transcripts from Task A resulted in 92.8% accuracy / 0.921 F1, a relative improvement of 2.8% and 3.3%, respectively.