INTERSPEECH 2011 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Florence, Italy August 27-31. 2011

Intra-, Inter-, and Cross-Cultural Classification of Vocal Affect

Daniel Neiberg (1), Petri Laukka (2), Hillary Anger Elfenbein (3)

(1) KTH, Sweden
(2) Stockholms Universitet, Sweden
(3) Washington University in St. Louis, USA

We present intra-, inter- and cross-cultural classifications of vocal expressions. Stimuli were selected from the VENEC corpus and consisted of portrayals of 11 emotions, each expressed with 3 levels of intensity. Classification (nu-SVM) was based on acoustic measures related to pitch, intensity, formants, voice source and duration. Results showed that mean recall across emotions was around 2.4.3 times higher than chance level for both intra- and inter-cultural conditions. For cross-cultural conditions, the relative performance dropped 26%, 32%, and 34% for high, medium, and low emotion intensity, respectively. This suggests that intra-cultural models were more sensitive to mismatched conditions for low emotion intensity. Preliminary results further indicated that recall rate varied as a function of emotion, with lust and sadness showing the smallest performance drops in the cross-cultural condition.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Neiberg, Daniel / Laukka, Petri / Elfenbein, Hillary Anger (2011): "Intra-, inter-, and cross-cultural classification of vocal affect", In INTERSPEECH-2011, 1581-1584.