INTERSPEECH 2013 14thAnnual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Lyon, France August 25-29, 2013

Energy and F₀ Contour Modeling with Functional Data Analysis for Emotional Speech Detection

Juan Pablo Arias (1), Carlos Busso (2), Néstor Becerra Yoma (1)

(1) Universidad de Chile, Chile
(2) University of Texas at Dallas, USA

This paper proposes the use of reference models to detect emotional prominence in the energy and F₀ contours. The proposed framework aims to model the intrinsic variability of these prosodic features. We present a novel approach based on Functional Data Analysis (FDA) to build reference models using a family of energy and F₀ contours, which are implemented with lexicon-independent models. The neutral models are represented by bases of functions and the testing energy and F₀ contours are characterized by their projections onto the corresponding bases. The proposed system can lead to accuracies as high as 80.4% in binary emotion classification in the EMO-DB corpus, which is 17.6% higher than the one achieved by a benchmark classifier trained with sentence level prosodic features. The approach is also evaluated with the SEMAINE corpus, showing that it can be effectively used in real applications.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Arias, Juan Pablo / Busso, Carlos / Yoma, Néstor Becerra (2013): "Energy and F₀ contour modeling with functional data analysis for emotional speech detection", In INTERSPEECH-2013, 2871-2875.