3,750 research outputs found
Emotional State Categorization from Speech: Machine vs. Human
This paper presents our investigations on emotional state categorization from
speech signals with a psychologically inspired computational model against
human performance under the same experimental setup. Based on psychological
studies, we propose a multistage categorization strategy which allows
establishing an automatic categorization model flexibly for a given emotional
speech categorization task. We apply the strategy to the Serbian Emotional
Speech Corpus (GEES) and the Danish Emotional Speech Corpus (DES), where human
performance was reported in previous psychological studies. Our work is the
first attempt to apply machine learning to the GEES corpus where the human
recognition rates were only available prior to our study. Unlike the previous
work on the DES corpus, our work focuses on a comparison to human performance
under the same experimental settings. Our studies suggest that
psychology-inspired systems yield behaviours that, to a great extent, resemble
what humans perceived and their performance is close to that of humans under
the same experimental setup. Furthermore, our work also uncovers some
differences between machine and humans in terms of emotional state recognition
from speech.Comment: 14 pages, 15 figures, 12 table
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Parallels in the sequential organization of birdsong and human speech.
Human speech possesses a rich hierarchical structure that allows for meaning to be altered by words spaced far apart in time. Conversely, the sequential structure of nonhuman communication is thought to follow non-hierarchical Markovian dynamics operating over only short distances. Here, we show that human speech and birdsong share a similar sequential structure indicative of both hierarchical and Markovian organization. We analyze the sequential dynamics of song from multiple songbird species and speech from multiple languages by modeling the information content of signals as a function of the sequential distance between vocal elements. Across short sequence-distances, an exponential decay dominates the information in speech and birdsong, consistent with underlying Markovian processes. At longer sequence-distances, the decay in information follows a power law, consistent with underlying hierarchical processes. Thus, the sequential organization of acoustic elements in two learned vocal communication signals (speech and birdsong) shows functionally equivalent dynamics, governed by similar processes
DNN adaptation by automatic quality estimation of ASR hypotheses
In this paper we propose to exploit the automatic Quality Estimation (QE) of
ASR hypotheses to perform the unsupervised adaptation of a deep neural network
modeling acoustic probabilities. Our hypothesis is that significant
improvements can be achieved by: i)automatically transcribing the evaluation
data we are currently trying to recognise, and ii) selecting from it a subset
of "good quality" instances based on the word error rate (WER) scores predicted
by a QE component. To validate this hypothesis, we run several experiments on
the evaluation data sets released for the CHiME-3 challenge. First, we operate
in oracle conditions in which manual transcriptions of the evaluation data are
available, thus allowing us to compute the "true" sentence WER. In this
scenario, we perform the adaptation with variable amounts of data, which are
characterised by different levels of quality. Then, we move to realistic
conditions in which the manual transcriptions of the evaluation data are not
available. In this case, the adaptation is performed on data selected according
to the WER scores "predicted" by a QE component. Our results indicate that: i)
QE predictions allow us to closely approximate the adaptation results obtained
in oracle conditions, and ii) the overall ASR performance based on the proposed
QE-driven adaptation method is significantly better than the strong, most
recent, CHiME-3 baseline.Comment: Computer Speech & Language December 201
Joint Modeling of Content and Discourse Relations in Dialogues
We present a joint modeling approach to identify salient discussion points in
spoken meetings as well as to label the discourse relations between speaker
turns. A variation of our model is also discussed when discourse relations are
treated as latent variables. Experimental results on two popular meeting
corpora show that our joint model can outperform state-of-the-art approaches
for both phrase-based content selection and discourse relation prediction
tasks. We also evaluate our model on predicting the consistency among team
members' understanding of their group decisions. Classifiers trained with
features constructed from our model achieve significant better predictive
performance than the state-of-the-art.Comment: Accepted by ACL 2017. 11 page
A new web interface to facilitate access to corpora: development of the ASLLRP data access interface
A significant obstacle to broad utilization of corpora is the difficulty in gaining access to the specific subsets of data and annotations that may be relevant for particular types of research. With that in mind, we have developed a web-based Data Access Interface (DAI), to provide access to the expanding datasets of the American Sign Language Linguistic Research Project (ASLLRP). The DAI facilitates browsing the corpora, viewing videos and annotations, searching for phenomena of interest, and downloading selected materials from the website. The web interface, compared to providing videos and annotation files off-line, also greatly increases access by people that have no prior experience in working with linguistic annotation tools, and it opens the door to integrating the data with third-party applications on the desktop and in the mobile space. In this paper we give an overview of the available videos, annotations, and search functionality of the DAI, as well as plans for future enhancements. We also summarize best practices and key lessons learned that are crucial to the success of similar projects
Improving the Generalizability of Speech Emotion Recognition: Methods for Handling Data and Label Variability
Emotion is an essential component in our interaction with others. It transmits information that helps us interpret the content of what others say. Therefore, detecting emotion from speech is an important step towards enabling machine understanding of human behaviors and intentions. Researchers have demonstrated the potential of emotion recognition in areas such as interactive systems in smart homes and mobile devices, computer games, and computational medical assistants. However, emotion communication is variable: individuals may express emotion in a manner that is uniquely their own; different speech content and environments may shape how emotion is expressed and recorded; individuals may perceive emotional messages differently. Practically, this variability is reflected in both the audio-visual data and the labels used to create speech emotion recognition (SER) systems. SER systems must be robust and generalizable to handle the variability effectively.
The focus of this dissertation is on the development of speech emotion recognition systems that handle variability in emotion communications. We break the dissertation into three parts, according to the type of variability we address: (I) in the data, (II) in the labels, and (III) in both the data and the labels.
Part I: The first part of this dissertation focuses on handling variability present in data. We approximate variations in environmental properties and expression styles by corpus and gender of the speakers. We find that training on multiple corpora and controlling for the variability in gender and corpus using multi-task learning result in more generalizable models, compared to the traditional single-task models that do not take corpus and gender variability into account. Another source of variability present in the recordings used in SER is the phonetic modulation of acoustics. On the other hand, phonemes also provide information about the emotion expressed in speech content. We discover that we can make more accurate predictions of emotion by explicitly considering both roles of phonemes.
Part II: The second part of this dissertation addresses variability present in emotion labels, including the differences between emotion expression and perception, and the variations in emotion perception. We discover that it is beneficial to jointly model both the perception of others and how one perceives one’s own expression, compared to focusing on either one. Further, we show that the variability in emotion perception is a modelable signal and can be captured using probability distributions that describe how groups of evaluators perceive emotional messages.
Part III: The last part of this dissertation presents methods that handle variability in both data and labels. We reduce the data variability due to non-emotional factors using deep metric learning and model the variability in emotion perception using soft labels. We propose a family of loss functions and show that by pairing examples that potentially vary in expression styles and lexical content and preserving the real-valued emotional similarity between them, we develop systems that generalize better across datasets and are more robust to over-training.
These works demonstrate the importance of considering data and label variability in the creation of robust and generalizable emotion recognition systems. We conclude this dissertation with the following future directions: (1) the development of real-time SER systems; (2) the personalization of general SER systems.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/147639/1/didizbq_1.pd
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