  Training machine learning algorithms for speech applications requires large,
labeled training data sets. This is problematic for clinical applications where
obtaining such data is prohibitively expensive because of privacy concerns or
lack of access. As a result, clinical speech applications are typically
developed using small data sets with only tens of speakers. In this paper, we
propose a method for simulating training data for clinical applications by
transforming healthy speech to dysarthric speech using adversarial training. We
evaluate the efficacy of our approach using both objective and subjective
criteria. We present the transformed samples to five experienced
speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and ask them to identify the samples as
healthy or dysarthric. The results reveal that the SLPs identify the
transformed speech as dysarthric 65% of the time. In a pilot classification
experiment, we show that by using the simulated speech samples to balance an
existing dataset, the classification accuracy improves by about 10% after data
augmentation.
