In this paper we evaluate the performance of 8 different speech rate estimators previously described in the literature by applying them on a multilingual test database. All the estimators show an underestimation at high speech rates and some also suffer from an overestimation at low speech rates. Overall the tested methods obtain high correlation coefficients with the reference speech rate. The Temporal Correlation and Selected Sub-band Correlation method (tcssbc), which uses sub-band and time domain correlation for detecting the number of vowels or diphthongs present in the speech signal, shows little errors and appears to be the most appropriate overall technique for speech rate estimation.
Dekens, T, Demol, M, Verhelst, W & Verhoeve, P 2007, 'A comparative study of speech rate estimation techniques', Proceedings of Interspeech. <http://www.etro.vub.ac.be/Research/DSSP/PUB_FILES/int_conf/INTERSPEECH2007-Dekens.pdf>
Dekens, T., Demol, M., Verhelst, W., & Verhoeve, P. (2007). A comparative study of speech rate estimation techniques. Proceedings of Interspeech. http://www.etro.vub.ac.be/Research/DSSP/PUB_FILES/int_conf/INTERSPEECH2007-Dekens.pdf
@article{5abd20ec348b4731a6a236ec1ca4dd0d,
title = "A comparative study of speech rate estimation techniques",
abstract = "In this paper we evaluate the performance of 8 different speech rate estimators previously described in the literature by applying them on a multilingual test database. All the estimators show an underestimation at high speech rates and some also suffer from an overestimation at low speech rates. Overall the tested methods obtain high correlation coefficients with the reference speech rate. The Temporal Correlation and Selected Sub-band Correlation method (tcssbc), which uses sub-band and time domain correlation for detecting the number of vowels or diphthongs present in the speech signal, shows little errors and appears to be the most appropriate overall technique for speech rate estimation.",
keywords = "cross lingual comparison, speech rate estimation",
author = "Tomas Dekens and Mike Demol and Werner Verhelst and Piet Verhoeve",
year = "2007",
month = aug,
day = "27",
language = "English",
journal = "Proceedings of Interspeech",
issn = "1990-9772",
note = "Interspeech 2007 ; Conference date: 27-08-2007 Through 31-08-2007",
url = "http://www.interspeech2007.org/orgcom.html",
}