I hear you eat and speak: automatic recognition of eating condition and food type, use-cases, and impact on ASR performance

We propose a new recognition task in the area of computational paralinguistics: automatic recognition of eating conditions in speech, i. e., whether people are eating while speaking, and what they are eating. To this end, we introduce the audio-visual iHEARu-EAT database featuring 1.6 k utterances of 30 subjects (mean age: 26.1 years, standard deviation: 2.66 years, gender balanced, German speakers), six types of food (Apple, Nectarine, Banana, Haribo Smurfs, Biscuit, and Crisps), and read as well as spontaneous speech, which is made publicly available for research purposes. We start with demonstrating that for automatic speech recognition (ASR), it pays off to know whether speakers are eating or not. We also propose automatic classification both by brute-forcing of low-level acoustic features as well as higher-level features related to intelligibility, obtained from an Automatic Speech Recogniser. Prediction of the eating condition was performed with a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier employed in a leave-one-speaker-out evaluation framework. Results show that the binary prediction of eating condition (i. e., eating or not eating) can be easily solved independently of the speaking condition; the obtained average recalls are all above 90%. Low-level acoustic features provide the best performance on spontaneous speech, which reaches up to 62.3% average recall for multi-way classification of the eating condition, i. e., discriminating the six types of food, as well as not eating. The early fusion of features related to intelligibility with the brute-forced acoustic feature set improves the performance on read speech, reaching a 66.4% average recall for the multi-way classification task. Analysing features and classifier errors leads to a suitable ordinal scale for eating conditions, on which automatic regression can be performed with up to 56.2% determination coefficient

The INTERSPEECH 2013 computational paralinguistics challenge: social signals, conflict, emotion, autism

The INTERSPEECH 2013 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge provides for the first time a unified test-bed for Social Signals such as laughter in speech. It further introduces conflict in group discussions as new tasks and picks up on autism and its manifestations in speech. Finally, emotion is revisited as task, albeit with a broader ranger of overall twelve emotional states. In this paper, we describe these four Sub-Challenges, Challenge conditions, baselines, and a new feature set by the openSMILE toolkit, provided to the participants. \em Bj\"orn Schuller$^1$, Stefan Steidl$^2$, Anton Batliner$^1$, Alessandro Vinciarelli$^{3,4}$, Klaus Scherer$^5$}\\ {\em Fabien Ringeval$^6$, Mohamed Chetouani$^7$, Felix Weninger$^1$, Florian Eyben$^1$, Erik Marchi$^1$, }\\ {\em Hugues Salamin$^3$, Anna Polychroniou$^3$, Fabio Valente$^4$, Samuel Kim$^4$

COVID-19 and Computer Audition: An Overview on What Speech & Sound Analysis Could Contribute in the SARS-CoV-2 Corona Crisis

At the time of writing, the world population is suffering from more than 10,000 registered COVID-19 disease epidemic induced deaths since the outbreak of the Corona virus more than three months ago now officially known as SARS-CoV-2. Since, tremendous efforts have been made worldwide to counter-steer and control the epidemic by now labelled as pandemic. In this contribution, we provide an overview on the potential for computer audition (CA), i.e., the usage of speech and sound analysis by artificial intelligence to help in this scenario. We first survey which types of related or contextually significant phenomena can be automatically assessed from speech or sound. These include the automatic recognition and monitoring of breathing, dry and wet coughing or sneezing sounds, speech under cold, eating behaviour, sleepiness, or pain to name but a few. Then, we consider potential use-cases for exploitation. These include risk assessment and diagnosis based on symptom histograms and their development over time, as well as monitoring of spread, social distancing and its effects, treatment and recovery, and patient wellbeing. We quickly guide further through challenges that need to be faced for real-life usage. We come to the conclusion that CA appears ready for implementation of (pre-)diagnosis and monitoring tools, and more generally provides rich and significant, yet so far untapped potential in the fight against COVID-19 spread

A survey on perceived speaker traits: personality, likability, pathology, and the first challenge

The INTERSPEECH 2012 Speaker Trait Challenge aimed at a unified test-bed for perceived speaker traits – the first challenge of this kind: personality in the five OCEAN personality dimensions, likability of speakers, and intelligibility of pathologic speakers. In the present article, we give a brief overview of the state-of-the-art in these three fields of research and describe the three sub-challenges in terms of the challenge conditions, the baseline results provided by the organisers, and a new openSMILE feature set, which has been used for computing the baselines and which has been provided to the participants. Furthermore, we summarise the approaches and the results presented by the participants to show the various techniques that are currently applied to solve these classification tasks

The Alcohol Hangover

The seeds and fruits (or their parts) of Iberoamerican crops have high nutritional and functional properties which could be utilized in a wide range of foods. The crops included in this book are amaranth (Amaranthus spp.), quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa), kañiwa (Chenopodium pallidicaule), chia (Salvia hispanica L.), Andean maize (Zea mays L.), moringa (Moringa oleifera), yvapuru (Plinia peruviana), kurugua (Sicana odorifera), sacha inchi (Plukenetia huayllabambana), camu camu (Myrciaria dubia), mango (Mangifera indica), tarwi (Lupinus mutabilis), peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) and taro (Colocasia esculenta), all of them still underutilized. Their cultivation is low; nevertheless, in recent years, the worldwide demand for some of them has increased immensely, resulting in an increase in their production. The ancient Iberoamerican crops have been widely recognized for their nutritional value by food scientists and food producers because they contain high-quality proteins and large quantities of micronutrients such as minerals, vitamins and bioactive compounds. In addition, they are gluten-free, which makes them suitable for people suffering from various gluten intolerances. This book summarizes the large amount of investigations in this field in the last year and provides knowledge within all the relevant areas of food science. The editors hope that this book will contribute to an increased use of these products in human nutrition by consumers worldwide

Descriptive Analysis of the Most Viewed Youtube Videos Related to the Opioid Epidemic

In 2016, over 11 million people misused prescription opioids and the economic costs were estimated to be over $500 billion. In the same year, opioids killed 42,000 people, which was more than any year on record. These data highlight the need to reduce the harm caused to individuals, families, communities, and the nation. One element of a more comprehensive national strategy is increasing awareness among citizens, physicians and policy makers. Given its widespread reach YouTube can be very helpful. There is a large literature on the opiate epidemic, but no published studies describing the sources or content of YouTube videos on the opiate epidemic were identified. This study was, therefore, intended to help fill this gap in current knowledge. YouTube was searched using two key terms, “opiate addiction” and “opioids.” The results were sorted by number of views, and the URL, title, and number of views were saved for videos with a minimum of 1,500 views. Videos were then screened for the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The remaining sample comprised 309 videos. Collectively, these 309 videos were viewed 44,693,887 times. The results revealed the sources that were most viewed and the nature of content that was and was not likely to be covered. The two main sources of videos were Internet Based and Television news/Entertainment. Compared with videos with health professions as the main speaker, those featuring consumers garnered almost 10 times as many cumulative views (30.35%versus 3.24%). Government organizations uploaded 11 videos (< 4%), collectively garnering 343,983 views (less than 1% of cumulative views). YouTube represents an important opportunity for health promotion and disease prevention regarding the opiate epidemic. However, improved understanding about ways to communicate accurate and useful information in ways that attract viewers is needed. Recommendations for research, policy and practice are presented relevant to how YouTube can help mitigate the harm caused by the opiate epidemic

Descriptive Analysis of the Most Viewed Youtube Videos Related to the Opioid Epidemic

In 2016, over 11 million people misused prescription opioids and the economic costs were estimated to be over $500 billion. In the same year, opioids killed 42,000 people, which was more than any year on record. These data highlight the need to reduce the harm caused to individuals, families, communities, and the nation. One element of a more comprehensive national strategy is increasing awareness among citizens, physicians and policy makers. Given its widespread reach YouTube can be very helpful. There is a large literature on the opiate epidemic, but no published studies describing the sources or content of YouTube videos on the opiate epidemic were identified. This study was, therefore, intended to help fill this gap in current knowledge. YouTube was searched using two key terms, “opiate addiction” and “opioids.” The results were sorted by number of views, and the URL, title, and number of views were saved for videos with a minimum of 1,500 views. Videos were then screened for the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The remaining sample comprised 309 videos. Collectively, these 309 videos were viewed 44,693,887 times. The results revealed the sources that were most viewed and the nature of content that was and was not likely to be covered. The two main sources of videos were Internet Based and Television news/Entertainment. Compared with videos with health professions as the main speaker, those featuring consumers garnered almost 10 times as many cumulative views (30.35%versus 3.24%). Government organizations uploaded 11 videos (< 4%), collectively garnering 343,983 views (less than 1% of cumulative views). YouTube represents an important opportunity for health promotion and disease prevention regarding the opiate epidemic. However, improved understanding about ways to communicate accurate and useful information in ways that attract viewers is needed. Recommendations for research, policy and practice are presented relevant to how YouTube can help mitigate the harm caused by the opiate epidemic