2,993 research outputs found
Predicting continuous conflict perception with Bayesian Gaussian processes
Conflict is one of the most important phenomena of social life, but it is still largely neglected by the computing community. This work proposes an approach
that detects common conversational social signals (loudness, overlapping speech,
etc.) and predicts the conflict level perceived by human observers in continuous,
non-categorical terms. The proposed regression approach is fully Bayesian and it
adopts Automatic Relevance Determination to identify the social signals that influence most the outcome of the prediction. The experiments are performed over the SSPNet Conflict Corpus, a publicly available collection of 1430 clips extracted from televised political debates (roughly 12 hours of material for 138 subjects in total). The results show that it is possible to achieve a correlation close to 0.8 between actual and predicted conflict perception
Detecting Low Rapport During Natural Interactions in Small Groups from Non-Verbal Behaviour
Rapport, the close and harmonious relationship in which interaction partners
are "in sync" with each other, was shown to result in smoother social
interactions, improved collaboration, and improved interpersonal outcomes. In
this work, we are first to investigate automatic prediction of low rapport
during natural interactions within small groups. This task is challenging given
that rapport only manifests in subtle non-verbal signals that are, in addition,
subject to influences of group dynamics as well as inter-personal
idiosyncrasies. We record videos of unscripted discussions of three to four
people using a multi-view camera system and microphones. We analyse a rich set
of non-verbal signals for rapport detection, namely facial expressions, hand
motion, gaze, speaker turns, and speech prosody. Using facial features, we can
detect low rapport with an average precision of 0.7 (chance level at 0.25),
while incorporating prior knowledge of participants' personalities can even
achieve early prediction without a drop in performance. We further provide a
detailed analysis of different feature sets and the amount of information
contained in different temporal segments of the interactions.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure
Dialogue Act Modeling for Automatic Tagging and Recognition of Conversational Speech
We describe a statistical approach for modeling dialogue acts in
conversational speech, i.e., speech-act-like units such as Statement, Question,
Backchannel, Agreement, Disagreement, and Apology. Our model detects and
predicts dialogue acts based on lexical, collocational, and prosodic cues, as
well as on the discourse coherence of the dialogue act sequence. The dialogue
model is based on treating the discourse structure of a conversation as a
hidden Markov model and the individual dialogue acts as observations emanating
from the model states. Constraints on the likely sequence of dialogue acts are
modeled via a dialogue act n-gram. The statistical dialogue grammar is combined
with word n-grams, decision trees, and neural networks modeling the
idiosyncratic lexical and prosodic manifestations of each dialogue act. We
develop a probabilistic integration of speech recognition with dialogue
modeling, to improve both speech recognition and dialogue act classification
accuracy. Models are trained and evaluated using a large hand-labeled database
of 1,155 conversations from the Switchboard corpus of spontaneous
human-to-human telephone speech. We achieved good dialogue act labeling
accuracy (65% based on errorful, automatically recognized words and prosody,
and 71% based on word transcripts, compared to a chance baseline accuracy of
35% and human accuracy of 84%) and a small reduction in word recognition error.Comment: 35 pages, 5 figures. Changes in copy editing (note title spelling
changed
Multimodal Speech Emotion Recognition Using Audio and Text
Speech emotion recognition is a challenging task, and extensive reliance has
been placed on models that use audio features in building well-performing
classifiers. In this paper, we propose a novel deep dual recurrent encoder
model that utilizes text data and audio signals simultaneously to obtain a
better understanding of speech data. As emotional dialogue is composed of sound
and spoken content, our model encodes the information from audio and text
sequences using dual recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and then combines the
information from these sources to predict the emotion class. This architecture
analyzes speech data from the signal level to the language level, and it thus
utilizes the information within the data more comprehensively than models that
focus on audio features. Extensive experiments are conducted to investigate the
efficacy and properties of the proposed model. Our proposed model outperforms
previous state-of-the-art methods in assigning data to one of four emotion
categories (i.e., angry, happy, sad and neutral) when the model is applied to
the IEMOCAP dataset, as reflected by accuracies ranging from 68.8% to 71.8%.Comment: 7 pages, Accepted as a conference paper at IEEE SLT 201
Parsing Speech: A Neural Approach to Integrating Lexical and Acoustic-Prosodic Information
In conversational speech, the acoustic signal provides cues that help
listeners disambiguate difficult parses. For automatically parsing spoken
utterances, we introduce a model that integrates transcribed text and
acoustic-prosodic features using a convolutional neural network over energy and
pitch trajectories coupled with an attention-based recurrent neural network
that accepts text and prosodic features. We find that different types of
acoustic-prosodic features are individually helpful, and together give
statistically significant improvements in parse and disfluency detection F1
scores over a strong text-only baseline. For this study with known sentence
boundaries, error analyses show that the main benefit of acoustic-prosodic
features is in sentences with disfluencies, attachment decisions are most
improved, and transcription errors obscure gains from prosody.Comment: Accepted in NAACL HLT 201
Continuous Interaction with a Virtual Human
Attentive Speaking and Active Listening require that a Virtual Human be capable of simultaneous perception/interpretation and production of communicative behavior. A Virtual Human should be able to signal its attitude and attention while it is listening to its interaction partner, and be able to attend to its interaction partner while it is speaking – and modify its communicative behavior on-the-fly based on what it perceives from its partner. This report presents the results of a four week summer project that was part of eNTERFACE’10. The project resulted in progress on several aspects of continuous interaction such as scheduling and interrupting multimodal behavior, automatic classification of listener responses, generation of response eliciting behavior, and models for appropriate reactions to listener responses. A pilot user study was conducted with ten participants. In addition, the project yielded a number of deliverables that are released for public access
Sympathy Begins with a Smile, Intelligence Begins with a Word: Use of Multimodal Features in Spoken Human-Robot Interaction
Recognition of social signals, from human facial expressions or prosody of
speech, is a popular research topic in human-robot interaction studies. There
is also a long line of research in the spoken dialogue community that
investigates user satisfaction in relation to dialogue characteristics.
However, very little research relates a combination of multimodal social
signals and language features detected during spoken face-to-face human-robot
interaction to the resulting user perception of a robot. In this paper we show
how different emotional facial expressions of human users, in combination with
prosodic characteristics of human speech and features of human-robot dialogue,
correlate with users' impressions of the robot after a conversation. We find
that happiness in the user's recognised facial expression strongly correlates
with likeability of a robot, while dialogue-related features (such as number of
human turns or number of sentences per robot utterance) correlate with
perceiving a robot as intelligent. In addition, we show that facial expression,
emotional features, and prosody are better predictors of human ratings related
to perceived robot likeability and anthropomorphism, while linguistic and
non-linguistic features more often predict perceived robot intelligence and
interpretability. As such, these characteristics may in future be used as an
online reward signal for in-situ Reinforcement Learning based adaptive
human-robot dialogue systems.Comment: Robo-NLP workshop at ACL 2017. 9 pages, 5 figures, 6 table
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