Personality prediction based on intonation stylization

This study's aim is to predict speaker personality from intonation patterns in spoken dialogs. Intonation patterns were extracted by a parametric superpositional stylization approach that allows for pattern description on a parametric as well as on a categorical level. Based on features derived from these representations we trained support vector machines and fitted generalized linear regression models to predict speaker personality with respect to the four dimensions acting, extroversion, other-directedness, and sensitivity. The personality classification accuracies ranged from 79 to 91%

Learning the hidden structure of speech: from communicative functions to prosody

Este artigo introduz um novo método, orientado via modelamento e via interação com dados comportamentais, para gerar padrões prosódicos a partir de informação metalingüística. Referimos aqui à habilidade geral da entoação de demarcar unidades de fala e veicular informação sobre as funções proposicional e interacional dessas unidades no discurso. Nossas hipóteses fortes são que (1) essas funções são diretamente implementadas como contornos prosódicos prototípicos que são co-extensivos às unidades para as quais eles se aplicam, (2) o padrão prosódico da mensagem é obtido ao superpor e adicionar todos os contornos elementares (Aubergé & Bailly, 1995). Descrevemos aqui um esquema de análise por síntese que consiste em identificar esses contornos prototípicos e separar suas contribuições respectivas nos contornos prosódicos dos dados de treinamento. O esquema é aplicado a bases de dados designadas para evidenciar várias funções entoacionais. Resultados experimentais mostram que o modelo gera contornos prosódicos adequados com pouquíssimos movimentos prototípicos

CoPaSul Manual -- Contour-based parametric and superpositional intonation stylization

The purposes of the CoPaSul toolkit are (1) automatic prosodic annotation and (2) prosodic feature extraction from syllable to utterance level. CoPaSul stands for contour-based, parametric, superpositional intonation stylization. In this framework intonation is represented as a superposition of global and local contours that are described parametrically in terms of polynomial coefficients. On the global level (usually associated but not necessarily restricted to intonation phrases) the stylization serves to represent register in terms of time-varying F0 level and range. On the local level (e.g. accent groups), local contour shapes are described. From this parameterization several features related to prosodic boundaries and prominence can be derived. Furthermore, by coefficient clustering prosodic contour classes can be obtained in a bottom-up way. Next to the stylization-based feature extraction also standard F0 and energy measures (e.g. mean and variance) as well as rhythmic aspects can be calculated. At the current state automatic annotation comprises: segmentation into interpausal chunks, syllable nucleus extraction, and unsupervised localization of prosodic phrase boundaries and prominent syllables. F0 and partly also energy feature sets can be derived for: standard measurements (as median and IQR), register in terms of F0 level and range, prosodic boundaries, local contour shapes, bottom-up derived contour classes, Gestalt of accent groups in terms of their deviation from higher level prosodic units, as well as for rhythmic aspects quantifying the relation between F0 and energy contours and prosodic event rates