INTERSPEECH 2008 9th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Brisbane, Australia September 22-26, 2008

Patterns, Prototypes, Performance: Classifying Emotional User States

Dino Seppi (1), Anton Batliner (2), Björn Schuller (3), Stefan Steidl (2), Thurid Vogt (4), Johannes Wagner (4), Laurence Devillers (5), Laurence Vidrascu (5), Noam Amir (6), Vered Aharonson (7)

(1) FBK-irst, Italy; (2) Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany; (3) Technische Universität München, Germany; (4) University of Augsburg, Germany; (5) LIMSI, France; (6) Tel Aviv University, Israel; (7) Tel Aviv Academic College of Engineering, Israel

In this paper, we report on classification results for emotional user states (4 classes, German database of children interacting with a pet robot). Starting with 5 emotion labels per word, we obtained chunks with different degrees of prototypicality. Six sites computed acoustic and linguistic features independently from each other. A total of 4232 features were pooled together and grouped into 10 low level descriptor types. For each of these groups separately and for all taken together, classification results using Support Vector Machines are reported for 150 features each with the highest individual Information Gain Ratio, for a scale of prototypicality. With both acoustic and linguistic features, we obtained a relative improvement of up to 27.6%, going from low to higher prototypicality.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Seppi, Dino / Batliner, Anton / Schuller, Björn / Steidl, Stefan / Vogt, Thurid / Wagner, Johannes / Devillers, Laurence / Vidrascu, Laurence / Amir, Noam / Aharonson, Vered (2008): "Patterns, prototypes, performance: classifying emotional user states", In INTERSPEECH-2008, 601-604.