This paper presents the development of a compact vocabulary for describing the audible characteristics of degraded speech. An experiment was conducted with 51 English-speaking subjects who were tasked with assigning one of a list of given text descriptors to 220 degradation conditions. Exploratory data analysis using hierarchical clustering resulted in a compact vocabulary of 10 classes, which was further validated by a bootstrap cluster analysis.
Index Terms: speech degraded vocabulary, speech quality, correspondence analysis