Intelligent Advanced User Interfaces for Monitoring Mental Health Wellbeing

It has become pressing to develop objective and automatic measurements integrated in intelligent diagnostic tools for detecting and monitoring depressive states and enabling an increased precision of diagnoses and clinical decision-makings. The challenge is to exploit behavioral and physiological biomarkers and develop Artificial Intelligent (AI) models able to extract information from a complex combination of signals considered key symptoms. The proposed AI models should be able to help clinicians to rapidly formulate accurate diagnoses and suggest personalized intervention plans ranging from coaching activities (exploiting for example serious games), support networks (via chats, or social networks), and alerts to caregivers, doctors, and care control centers, reducing the considerable burden on national health care institutions in terms of medical, and social costs associated to depression cares

Analysis and detection of human emotion and stress from speech signals

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Temporal contextual descriptors and applications to emotion analysis.

The current trends in technology suggest that the next generation of services and devices allows smarter customization and automatic context recognition. Computers learn the behavior of the users and can offer them customized services depending on the context, location, and preferences. One of the most important challenges in human-machine interaction is the proper understanding of human emotions by machines and automated systems. In the recent years, the progress made in machine learning and pattern recognition led to the development of algorithms that are able to learn the detection and identification of human emotions from experience. These algorithms use different modalities such as image, speech, and physiological signals to analyze and learn human emotions. In many settings, the vocal information might be more available than other modalities due to widespread of voice sensors in phones, cars, and computer systems in general. In emotion analysis from speech, an audio utterance is represented by an ordered (in time) sequence of features or a multivariate time series. Typically, the sequence is further mapped into a global descriptor representative of the entire utterance/sequence. This descriptor is used for classification and analysis. In classic approaches, statistics are computed over the entire sequence and used as a global descriptor. This often results in the loss of temporal ordering from the original sequence. Emotion is a succession of acoustic events. By discarding the temporal ordering of these events in the mapping, the classic approaches cannot detect acoustic patterns that lead to a certain emotion. In this dissertation, we propose a novel feature mapping framework. The proposed framework maps temporally ordered sequence of acoustic features into data-driven global descriptors that integrate the temporal information from the original sequence. The framework contains three mapping algorithms. These algorithms integrate the temporal information implicitly and explicitly in the descriptor\u27s representation. In the rst algorithm, the Temporal Averaging Algorithm, we average the data temporally using leaky integrators to produce a global descriptor that implicitly integrates the temporal information from the original sequence. In order to integrate the discrimination between classes in the mapping, we propose the Temporal Response Averaging Algorithm which combines the temporal averaging step of the previous algorithm and unsupervised learning to produce data driven temporal contextual descriptors. In the third algorithm, we use the topology preserving property of the Self-Organizing Maps and the continuous nature of speech to map a temporal sequence into an ordered trajectory representing the behavior over time of the input utterance on a 2-D map of emotions. The temporal information is integrated explicitly in the descriptor which makes it easier to monitor emotions in long speeches. The proposed mapping framework maps speech data of different length to the same equivalent representation which alleviates the problem of dealing with variable length temporal sequences. This is advantageous in real time setting where the size of the analysis window can be variable. Using the proposed feature mapping framework, we build a novel data-driven speech emotion detection and recognition system that indexes speech databases to facilitate the classification and retrieval of emotions. We test the proposed system using two datasets. The first corpus is acted. We showed that the proposed mapping framework outperforms the classic approaches while providing descriptors that are suitable for the analysis and visualization of humans’ emotions in speech data. The second corpus is an authentic dataset. In this dissertation, we evaluate the performances of our system using a collection of debates. For that purpose, we propose a novel debate collection that is one of the first initiatives in the literature. We show that the proposed system is able to learn human emotions from debates

Speech emotion recognition through statistical classification

O propósito desta dissertação é a discussão do reconhecimento de emoção na voz. Para este fim, criou-se uma base de dados validada de discurso emocional simulado Português, intitulada European Portuguese Emotional Discourse Database (EPEDD) e foram operados algoritmos de classificação estatística nessa base de dados. EPEDD é uma base de dados simulada, caracterizada por pequenos discursos (5 frases longas, 5 frases curtas e duas palavras), todos eles pronunciados por 8 atores—ambos os sexos igualmente representados—em 9 diferentes emoções (raiva, alegria, nojo, excitação, apatia, medo, surpresa, tristeza e neutro), baseadas no modelo de emoções de Lövheim. Concretizou-se uma avaliação de 40% da base de dados por avaliadores inexperientes, filtrando 60% dos pequenos discursos, com o intuito de criar uma base de dados validada. A base de dados completa contem 718 instâncias, enquanto que a base de dados validada contém 116 instâncias. A qualidade média de representação teatral, numa escala de a 5 foi avaliada como 2,3. A base de dados validada é composta por discurso emocional cujas emoções são reconhecidas com uma taxa média de 69,6%, por avaliadores inexperientes. A raiva tem a taxa de reconhecimento mais elevada com 79,7%, enquanto que o nojo, a emoção cuja taxa de reconhecimento é a mais baixa, consta com 40,5%. A extração de características e a classificação estatística foi realizada respetivamente através dos softwares Opensmile e Weka. Os algoritmos foram operados na base dados original e na base de dados avaliada, tendo sido obtidos os melhores resultados através de SVMs, respetivamente com 48,7% e 44,0%. A apatia obteve a taxa de reconhecimento mais elevada com 79,0%, enquanto que a excitação obteve a taxa de reconhecimento mais baixa com 32,9%.The purpose of this dissertation is to discuss speech emotion recognition. It was created a validated acted Portuguese emotional speech database, named European Portuguese Emotional Discourse Database (EPEDD), and statistical classification algorithms have been applied on it. EPEDD is an acted database, featuring 12 utterances (2 single-words, 5 short sentences and 5 long sentences) per actor and per emotion, 8 actors, both genders equally represented, and 9 emotions (anger, joy, disgust, excitement, fear, apathy, surprise, sadness and neutral), based on Lövheim’s emotion model. We had 40% of the database evaluated by unexperienced evaluators, enabling us to produce a validated one, filtering 60% of the evaluated utterances. The full database contains 718 instances, while the validated one contains 116 instances. The average acting quality of the original database was evaluated, in a scale from 1 to 5, as 2,3. The validated database is composed by emotional utterances that have their emotions recognized on average at a 69,6% rate, by unexperienced judges. Anger had the highest recognition rate at 79,7%, while disgust had the lowest recognition rate at 40,5%. Feature extraction and statistical classification algorithms were performed respectively applying Opensmile and Weka software. Statistical classification algorithms operated in the full database and in the validated one, best results being obtained by SVMs, respectively the emotion recognition rates being 48,7% and 44,0%. Apathy had the highest recognition rate: 79.0%, while excitement had the lowest emotion recognition rate: 32.9%

Specific Language Impairments and Possibilities of Classification and Detection from Children's Speech

Many young children have speech disorders. My research focused on one such disorder, known as specific language impairment or developmental dysphasia. A major problem in treating this disorder is the fact that specific language impairment is detected in children at a relatively late age. For successful speech therapy, early diagnosis is critical. I present two different approaches to this issue using a very simple test that I have devised for diagnosing this disorder. In this thesis, I describe a new method for detecting specific language impairment based on the number of pronunciation errors in utterances. An advantage of this method is its simplicity; anyone can use it, including parents. The second method is based on the acoustic features of the speech signal. An advantage of this method is that it could be used to develop an automatic detection system. KeyKatedra teorie obvod

Computational modeling of turn-taking dynamics in spoken conversations

The study of human interaction dynamics has been at the center for multiple research disciplines in- cluding computer and social sciences, conversational analysis and psychology, for over decades. Recent interest has been shown with the aim of designing computational models to improve human-machine interaction system as well as support humans in their decision-making process. Turn-taking is one of the key aspects of conversational dynamics in dyadic conversations and is an integral part of human- human, and human-machine interaction systems. It is used for discourse organization of a conversation by means of explicit phrasing, intonation, and pausing, and it involves intricate timing. In verbal (e.g., telephone) conversation, the turn transitions are facilitated by inter- and intra- speaker silences and over- laps. In early research of turn-taking in the speech community, the studies include durational aspects of turns, cues for turn yielding intention and lastly designing turn transition modeling for spoken dia- log agents. Compared to the studies of turn transitions very few works have been done for classifying overlap discourse, especially the competitive act of overlaps and function of silences. Given the limitations of the current state-of-the-art, this dissertation focuses on two aspects of con- versational dynamics: 1) design automated computational models for analyzing turn-taking behavior in a dyadic conversation, 2) predict the outcome of the conversations, i.e., observed user satisfaction, using turn-taking descriptors, and later these two aspects are used to design a conversational profile for each speaker using turn-taking behavior and the outcome of the conversations. The analysis, experiments, and evaluation has been done on a large dataset of Italian call-center spoken conversations where customers and agents are engaged in real problem-solving tasks. Towards solving our research goal, the challenges include automatically segmenting and aligning speakers’ channel from the speech signal, identifying and labeling the turn-types and its functional aspects. The task becomes more challenging due to the presence of overlapping speech. To model turn- taking behavior, the intension behind these overlapping turns needed to be considered. However, among all, the most critical question is how to model observed user satisfaction in a dyadic conversation and what properties of turn-taking behavior can be used to represent and predict the outcome. Thus, the computational models for analyzing turn-taking dynamics, in this dissertation includes au- tomatic segmenting and labeling turn types, categorization of competitive vs non-competitive overlaps, silences (e.g., lapse, pauses) and functions of turns in terms of dialog acts. The novel contributions of the work presented here are to 1. design of a fully automated turn segmentation and labeling (e.g., agent vs customer’s turn, lapse within the speaker, and overlap) system. 2. the design of annotation guidelines for segmenting and annotating the speech overlaps with the competitive and non-competitive labels. 3. demonstrate how different channels of information such as acoustic, linguistic, and psycholin- guistic feature sets perform in the classification of competitive vs non-competitive overlaps. 4. study the role of speakers and context (i.e., agents’ and customers’ speech) for conveying the information of competitiveness for each individual feature set and their combinations. 5. investigate the function of long silences towards the information flow in a dyadic conversation. The extracted turn-taking cues is then used to automatically predict the outcome of the conversation, which is modeled from continuous manifestations of emotion. The contributions include 1. modeling the state of the observed user satisfaction in terms of the final emotional manifestation of the customer (i.e., user). 2. analysis and modeling turn-taking properties to display how each turn type influence the user satisfaction. 3. study of how turn-taking behavior changes within each emotional state. Based on the studies conducted in this work, it is demonstrated that turn-taking behavior, specially competitiveness of overlaps, is more than just an organizational tool in daily human interactions. It represents the beneficial information and contains the power to predict the outcome of the conversation in terms of satisfaction vs not-satisfaction. Combining the turn-taking behavior and the outcome of the conversation, the final and resultant goal is to design a conversational profile for each speaker. Such profiled information not only facilitate domain experts but also would be useful to the call center agent in real time. These systems are fully automated and no human intervention is required. The findings are po- tentially relevant to the research of overlapping speech and automatic analysis of human-human and human-machine interactions

Studying dialects to understand human language

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2009.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 65-71).This thesis investigates the study of dialect variations as a way to understand how humans might process speech. It evaluates some of the important research in dialect identification and draws conclusions about how their results can give insights into human speech processing. A study clustering dialects using k-means clustering is done. Self-organizing maps are proposed as a tool for dialect research, and a self-organizing map is implemented for the purposes of testing this. Several areas for further research are identified, including how dialects are stored in the brain, more detailed descriptions of how dialects vary, including contextual effects, and more sophisticated visualization tools. Keywords: dialect, accent, identification, recognition, self-organizing maps, words, lexical sets, clustering.by Akua Afriyie Nti.M.Eng