  This study investigates how surgical intervention for speech pathology
(specifically, as a result of oral cancer surgery) impacts the performance of
an automatic speaker verification (ASV) system. Using two recently collected
Dutch datasets with parallel pre and post-surgery audio from the same speaker,
NKI-OC-VC and SPOKE, we assess the extent to which speech pathology influences
ASV performance, and whether objective/subjective measures of speech severity
are correlated with the performance. Finally, we carry out a perceptual study
to compare judgements of ASV and human listeners. Our findings reveal that
pathological speech negatively affects ASV performance, and the severity of the
speech is negatively correlated with the performance. There is a moderate
agreement in perceptual and objective scores of speaker similarity and
severity, however, we could not clearly establish in the perceptual study,
whether the same phenomenon also exists in human perception.
