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Peter Plantinga

Alumni

Publications

Comparison of Speech Tasks in Human Expert and Machine Detection of Parkinson's Disease
Peter Plantinga
Roozbeh Sattari
Karine Marcotte
Carla Di Gironimo
Madeleine Sharp
Liziane Bouvier
Maiya Geddes
Ingrid Verduyckt
'Etienne de Villers-Sidani
Mirco Ravanelli
Denise Klein
2025-10-08
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
From Black Box to Biomarker: Sparse Autoencoders for Interpreting Speech Models of Parkinson's Disease
Peter Plantinga
Jen-Kai Chen
Roozbeh Sattari
Mirco Ravanelli
Denise Klein
Speech holds promise as a cost-effective and non-invasive biomarker for neurological conditions such as Parkinson's disease (PD). While deep… (see more) learning systems trained on raw audio can find subtle signals not available from hand-crafted features, their black-box nature hinders clinical adoption. To address this, we apply sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to uncover interpretable internal representations from a speech-based PD detection system. We introduce a novel mask-based activation for adapting SAEs to small biomedical datasets, creating sparse disentangled dictionary representations. These dictionary entries are found to have strong associations with characteristic articulatory deficits in PD speech, such as reduced spectral flux and increased spectral flatness in the low-energy regions highlighted by the model attention. We further show that the spectral flux is related to volumetric measurements of the putamen from MRI scans, demonstrating the potential of SAEs to reveal clinically relevant biomarkers for disease monitoring and diagnosis.
2025-07-01
arXiv (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Does Language Matter for Early Detection of Parkinson's Disease from Speech?
Peter Plantinga
Briac Cordelle
Dominique Louër
Mirco Ravanelli
Denise Klein
Using speech samples as a biomarker is a promising avenue for detecting and monitoring the progression of Parkinson's disease (PD), but ther… (see more)e is considerable disagreement in the literature about how best to collect and analyze such data. Early research in detecting PD from speech used a sustained vowel phonation (SVP) task, while some recent research has explored recordings of more cognitively demanding tasks. To assess the role of language in PD detection, we tested pretrained models with varying data types and pretraining objectives and found that (1) text-only models match the performance of vocal-feature models, (2) multilingual Whisper outperforms self-supervised models whereas monolingual Whisper does worse, and (3) AudioSet pretraining improves performance on SVP but not spontaneous speech. These findings together highlight the critical role of language for the early detection of Parkinson's disease.
2025-01-01
2025 IEEE 35th International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP) (published)
doi.org
Open-Source Conversational AI with SpeechBrain 1.0
Mirco Ravanelli
Titouan Parcollet
Adel Moumen
Sylvain de Langen
Cem Subakan
Peter Plantinga
Yingzhi Wang
Pooneh Mousavi
Luca Della Libera
Artem Ploujnikov
Francesco Paissan
Davide Borra
Salah Zaiem
Zeyu Zhao
Shucong Zhang
Georgios Karakasidis
Sung-Lin Yeh
Pierre Champion
Aku Rouhe
Rudolf Braun … (see 11 more)
Florian Mai
Juan Pablo Zuluaga
Seyed Mahed Mousavi
Andreas Nautsch
Xuechen Liu
Sangeet Sagar
Jarod Duret
Salima Mdhaffar
G. Laperriere
Renato De Mori
Yannick Estève
SpeechBrain is an open-source Conversational AI toolkit based on PyTorch, focused particularly on speech processing tasks such as speech rec… (see more)ognition, speech enhancement, speaker recognition, text-to-speech, and much more. It promotes transparency and replicability by releasing both the pre-trained models and the complete"recipes"of code and algorithms required for training them. This paper presents SpeechBrain 1.0, a significant milestone in the evolution of the toolkit, which now has over 200 recipes for speech, audio, and language processing tasks, and more than 100 models available on Hugging Face. SpeechBrain 1.0 introduces new technologies to support diverse learning modalities, Large Language Model (LLM) integration, and advanced decoding strategies, along with novel models, tasks, and modalities. It also includes a new benchmark repository, offering researchers a unified platform for evaluating models across diverse tasks
2024-06-29
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
SpeechBrain: A General-Purpose Speech Toolkit
Mirco Ravanelli
Titouan Parcollet
Peter Plantinga
Aku Rouhe
Samuele Cornell
Loren Lugosch
Cem Subakan
Nauman Dawalatabad
Abdelwahab Heba
Jianyuan Zhong
Ju-chieh Chou
Sung-Lin Yeh
Szu-wei Fu
Chien-Feng Liao
Elena Rastorgueva
Franccois Grondin
William Aris
Hwidong Na
Yan Gao
Renato De Mori … (see 1 more)
Yoshua Bengio
SpeechBrain is an open-source and all-in-one speech toolkit. It is designed to facilitate the research and development of neural speech proc… (see more)essing technologies by being simple, flexible, user-friendly, and well-documented. This paper describes the core architecture designed to support several tasks of common interest, allowing users to naturally conceive, compare and share novel speech processing pipelines. SpeechBrain achieves competitive or state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of speech benchmarks. It also provides training recipes, pretrained models, and inference scripts for popular speech datasets, as well as tutorials which allow anyone with basic Python proficiency to familiarize themselves with speech technologies.
2021-06-08
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org