Psychological stress measurement through voice output analysis

Audio tape recordings of selected Skylab communications were processed by a psychological stress evaluator. Strip chart tracings were read blind and scores were assigned based on characteristics reported by the manufacturer to indicate psychological stress. These scores were analyzed for their empirical relationships with operational variables in Skylab judged to represent varying degrees of situational stress. Although some statistically significant relationships were found, the technique was not judged to be sufficiently predictive to warrant its use in assessing the degree of psychological stress of crew members in future space missions

Prosodic focus in Vietnamese

This paper reports on pilot work on the expression of Information Structure in Vietnamese and argues that Focus in Vietnamese is exclusively expressed prosodically: there are no specific focus markers, and the language uses phonology to express intonational emphasis in similar ways to languages like English or German. The exploratory data indicates that (i) focus is prosodically expressed while word order remains constant, (ii) listeners show good recoverability of the intended focus structure, and (iii) that there is a trading relationship between several phonetic parameters (duration, f0, amplitude) involved to signal prosodic (acoustic) emphasis

Empathic Agent Technology (EAT)

A new view on empathic agents is introduced, named: Empathic Agent Technology (EAT). It incorporates a speech analysis, which provides an indication for the amount of tension present in people. It is founded on an indirect physiological measure for the amount of experienced stress, defined as the variability of the fundamental frequency of the human voice. A thorough review of literature is provided on which the EAT is founded. In addition, the complete processing line of this measure is introduced. Hence, the first generally applicable, completely automated technique is introduced that enables the development of truly empathic agents

Temporal Parameters of Spontaneous Speech in Forensic Speaker Identification in Case of Language Mismatch: Serbian as L1 and English as L2

Celem badania jest analiza możliwości identyfikacji mówcy kryminalistycznego i sądowego podczas zadawania pytań w różnych językach, z wykorzystaniem parametrów temporalnych. (wskaźnik artykulcji, wskaźnik mowy, stopień niezdecydowania, odsetek pauz, średnia czas trwania pauzy). Korpus obejmuje 10 mówców kobiet z Serbii, które znają język angielksi na poziomie zaawwansowanym. Patrametry są badane z wykorzystaniem beayesowskiego wzoru wskaźnika prawdopodobieństwa w 40 parach tcyh samych mówców i w 230 parach różnych mówców, z uwzględnieniem szacunku wskaźnika błędu, równiego wskaźnika błędu i Całościowego Wskaźnika Prawdopodobieństwa. badanie ma charakter pionierski w zakresie językoznawstwa sądowego i kryminalistycznego por1) ónawczego w parze jezyka serbskiego i angielskiego, podobnie, jak analiza parametrów temporalnych mówców bilingwalnych. Dalsze badania inny skoncentrować się na porównaniu języków z rytmem akcentowym i z rytmem sylabicznym. The purpose of the research is to examine the possibility of forensic speaker identification if question and suspect sample are in different languages using temporal parameters (articulation rate, speaking rate, degree of hesitancy, percentage of pauses, average pause duration). The corpus includes 10 female native speakers of Serbian who are proficient in English. The parameters are tested using Bayesian likelihood ratio formula in 40 same-speaker and 360 different-speaker pairs, including estimation of error rates, equal error rates and Overall Likelihood Ratio. One-way ANOVA is performed to determine whether inter-speaker variability is higher than intra- speaker variability across languages. The most successful discriminant is degree of hesitancy with ER of 42.5%/28%, (EER: 33%), followed by average pause duration with ER 35%/45.56%, (EER: 40%). Although the research features a closed-set comparison, which is not very common in forensic reality, the results are still relevant for forensic phoneticians working on criminal cases or as expert witnesses. This study pioneers in forensically comparing Serbian and English as well as in forensically testing temporal parameters on bilingual speakers. Further research should focus on comparing two stress-timed or two syllable-timed languages to test whether they will be more comparable in terms of temporal aspects of speech.

Identyfikacja parametrów czasowych mowy spontanicznej mówców kryminalistycznych w przypadku niedopasowania językowego: język serbski jako L1 i język angielski jako L2

The purpose of the research is to examine the possibility of forensic speaker identification if question and suspect sample are in different languages using temporal parameters (articulation rate, speaking rate, degree of hesitancy, percentage of pauses, average pause duration). The corpus includes 10 female native speakers of Serbian who are proficient in English. The parameters are tested using Bayesian likelihood ratio formula in 40 same-speaker and 360 different-speaker pairs, including estimation of error rates, equal error rates and Overall Likelihood Ratio. One-way ANOVA is performed to determine whether inter-speaker variability is higher than intra- speaker variability across languages. The most successful discriminant is degree of hesitancy with ER of 42.5%/28%, (EER: 33%), followed by average pause duration with ER 35%/45.56%, (EER: 40%). Although the research features a closed-set comparison, which is not very common in forensic reality, the results are still relevant for forensic phoneticians working on criminal cases or as expert witnesses. This study pioneers in forensically comparing Serbian and English as well as in forensically testing temporal parameters on bilingual speakers. Further research should focus on comparing two stress-timed or two syllable-timed languages to test whether they will be more comparable in terms of temporal aspects of speech. Celem badania jest analiza możliwości identyfikacji mówcy kryminalistycznego i sądowego podczas zadawania pytań w różnych językach, z wykorzystaniem parametrów temporalnych. (wskaźnik artykulcji, wskaźnik mowy, stopień niezdecydowania, odsetek pauz, średnia czas trwania pauzy). Korpus obejmuje 10 mówców kobiet z Serbii, które znają język angielksi na poziomie zaawwansowanym. Patrametry są badane z wykorzystaniem beayesowskiego wzoru wskaźnika prawdopodobieństwa w 40 parach tcyh samych mówców i w 230 parach różnych mówców, z uwzględnieniem szacunku wskaźnika błędu, równiego wskaźnika błędu i Całościowego Wskaźnika Prawdopodobieństwa. badanie ma charakter pionierski w zakresie językoznawstwa sądowego i kryminalistycznego por1) ónawczego w parze jezyka serbskiego i angielskiego, podobnie, jak analiza parametrów temporalnych mówców bilingwalnych. Dalsze badania inny skoncentrować się na porównaniu języków z rytmem akcentowym i z rytmem sylabicznym.

Improvising Linguistic Style: Social and Affective Bases for Agent Personality

This paper introduces Linguistic Style Improvisation, a theory and set of algorithms for improvisation of spoken utterances by artificial agents, with applications to interactive story and dialogue systems. We argue that linguistic style is a key aspect of character, and show how speech act representations common in AI can provide abstract representations from which computer characters can improvise. We show that the mechanisms proposed introduce the possibility of socially oriented agents, meet the requirements that lifelike characters be believable, and satisfy particular criteria for improvisation proposed by Hayes-Roth.Comment: 10 pages, uses aaai.sty, lingmacros.sty, psfig.st

Automatic Detection of Laryngeal Pathology on Sustained Vowels Using Short-Term Cepstral Parameters: Analysis of Performance and Theoretical Justification

The majority of speech signal analysis procedures for automatic detection of laryngeal pathologies mainly rely on parameters extracted from time domain processing. Moreover, calculation of these parameters often requires prior pitch period estimation; therefore, their validity heavily depends on the robustness of pitch detection. Within this paper, an alternative approach based on cepstral- domain processing is presented which has the advantage of not requiring pitch estimation, thus providing a gain in both simplicity and robustness. While the proposed scheme is similar to solutions based on Mel-frequency cepstral parameters, already present in literature, it has an easier physical interpretation while achieving similar performance standards