ISCA Archive Interspeech 2023
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2023

Enhancing the EEG Speech Match Mismatch Tasks With Word Boundaries

Akshara Soman, Vidhi Sinha, Sriram Ganapathy

Recent studies have shown that the underlying neural mechanisms of human speech comprehension can be analyzed using a match-mismatch classification of the speech stimulus and the neural response. However, such studies have been conducted for fixed-duration segments without accounting for the discrete processing of speech in the brain. In this work, we establish that word boundary information plays a significant role in sentence processing by relating EEG to its speech input. We process the speech and the EEG signals using a network of convolution layers. Then, a word boundary-based average pooling is performed on the representations, and the inter-word context is incorporated using a recurrent layer. The experiments show that the modelling accuracy can be significantly improved (match-mismatch classification accuracy) to 93% on a publicly available speech-EEG data set, while previous efforts achieved an accuracy of 65-75% for this task.