An Empirical Analysis of the Role of Amplifiers, Downtoners, and Negations in Emotion Classification in Microblogs

The effect of amplifiers, downtoners, and negations has been studied in general and particularly in the context of sentiment analysis. However, there is only limited work which aims at transferring the results and methods to discrete classes of emotions, e. g., joy, anger, fear, sadness, surprise, and disgust. For instance, it is not straight-forward to interpret which emotion the phrase "not happy" expresses. With this paper, we aim at obtaining a better understanding of such modifiers in the context of emotion-bearing words and their impact on document-level emotion classification, namely, microposts on Twitter. We select an appropriate scope detection method for modifiers of emotion words, incorporate it in a document-level emotion classification model as additional bag of words and show that this approach improves the performance of emotion classification. In addition, we build a term weighting approach based on the different modifiers into a lexical model for the analysis of the semantics of modifiers and their impact on emotion meaning. We show that amplifiers separate emotions expressed with an emotion- bearing word more clearly from other secondary connotations. Downtoners have the opposite effect. In addition, we discuss the meaning of negations of emotion-bearing words. For instance we show empirically that "not happy" is closer to sadness than to anger and that fear-expressing words in the scope of downtoners often express surprise.Comment: Accepted for publication at The 5th IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA), https://dsaa2018.isi.it

Sparsity in Dynamics of Spontaneous Subtle Emotions: Analysis \& Application

Spontaneous subtle emotions are expressed through micro-expressions, which are tiny, sudden and short-lived dynamics of facial muscles; thus poses a great challenge for visual recognition. The abrupt but significant dynamics for the recognition task are temporally sparse while the rest, irrelevant dynamics, are temporally redundant. In this work, we analyze and enforce sparsity constrains to learn significant temporal and spectral structures while eliminate irrelevant facial dynamics of micro-expressions, which would ease the challenge in the visual recognition of spontaneous subtle emotions. The hypothesis is confirmed through experimental results of automatic spontaneous subtle emotion recognition with several sparsity levels on CASME II and SMIC, the only two publicly available spontaneous subtle emotion databases. The overall performances of the automatic subtle emotion recognition are boosted when only significant dynamics are preserved from the original sequences.Comment: IEEE Transaction of Affective Computing (2016

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

A Robust Method for Speech Emotion Recognition Based on Infinite Student’s t

Speech emotion classification method, proposed in this paper, is based on Student’s t-mixture model with infinite component number (iSMM) and can directly conduct effective recognition for various kinds of speech emotion samples. Compared with the traditional GMM (Gaussian mixture model), speech emotion model based on Student’s t-mixture can effectively handle speech sample outliers that exist in the emotion feature space. Moreover, t-mixture model could keep robust to atypical emotion test data. In allusion to the high data complexity caused by high-dimensional space and the problem of insufficient training samples, a global latent space is joined to emotion model. Such an approach makes the number of components divided infinite and forms an iSMM emotion model, which can automatically determine the best number of components with lower complexity to complete various kinds of emotion characteristics data classification. Conducted over one spontaneous (FAU Aibo Emotion Corpus) and two acting (DES and EMO-DB) universal speech emotion databases which have high-dimensional feature samples and diversiform data distributions, the iSMM maintains better recognition performance than the comparisons. Thus, the effectiveness and generalization to the high-dimensional data and the outliers are verified. Hereby, the iSMM emotion model is verified as a robust method with the validity and generalization to outliers and high-dimensional emotion characters

Automated Semantic Understanding of Human Emotions in Writing and Speech

Affective Human Computer Interaction (A-HCI) will be critical for the success of new technologies that will prevalent in the 21st century. If cell phones and the internet are any indication, there will be continued rapid development of automated assistive systems that help humans to live better, more productive lives. These will not be just passive systems such as cell phones, but active assistive systems like robot aides in use in hospitals, homes, entertainment room, office, and other work environments. Such systems will need to be able to properly deduce human emotional state before they determine how to best interact with people. This dissertation explores and extends the body of knowledge related to Affective HCI. New semantic methodologies are developed and studied for reliable and accurate detection of human emotional states and magnitudes in written and spoken speech; and for mapping emotional states and magnitudes to 3-D facial expression outputs. The automatic detection of affect in language is based on natural language processing and machine learning approaches. Two affect corpora were developed to perform this analysis. Emotion classification is performed at the sentence level using a step-wise approach which incorporates sentiment flow and sentiment composition features. For emotion magnitude estimation, a regression model was developed to predict evolving emotional magnitude of actors. Emotional magnitudes at any point during a story or conversation are determined by 1) previous emotional state magnitude; 2) new text and speech inputs that might act upon that state; and 3) information about the context the actors are in. Acoustic features are also used to capture additional information from the speech signal. Evaluation of the automatic understanding of affect is performed by testing the model on a testing subset of the newly extended corpus. To visualize actor emotions as perceived by the system, a methodology was also developed to map predicted emotion class magnitudes to 3-D facial parameters using vertex-level mesh morphing. The developed sentence level emotion state detection approach achieved classification accuracies as high as 71% for the neutral vs. emotion classification task in a test corpus of children’s stories. After class re-sampling, the results of the step-wise classification methodology on a test sub-set of a medical drama corpus achieved accuracies in the 56% to 84% range for each emotion class and polarity. For emotion magnitude prediction, the developed recurrent (prior-state feedback) regression model using both text-based and acoustic based features achieved correlation coefficients in the range of 0.69 to 0.80. This prediction function was modeled using a non-linear approach based on Support Vector Regression (SVR) and performed better than other approaches based on Linear Regression or Artificial Neural Networks

The GTZAN dataset: Its contents, its faults, their effects on evaluation, and its future use

The GTZAN dataset appears in at least 100 published works, and is the most-used public dataset for evaluation in machine listening research for music genre recognition (MGR). Our recent work, however, shows GTZAN has several faults (repetitions, mislabelings, and distortions), which challenge the interpretability of any result derived using it. In this article, we disprove the claims that all MGR systems are affected in the same ways by these faults, and that the performances of MGR systems in GTZAN are still meaningfully comparable since they all face the same faults. We identify and analyze the contents of GTZAN, and provide a catalog of its faults. We review how GTZAN has been used in MGR research, and find few indications that its faults have been known and considered. Finally, we rigorously study the effects of its faults on evaluating five different MGR systems. The lesson is not to banish GTZAN, but to use it with consideration of its contents.Comment: 29 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables, 128 reference

Multimodaalsel emotsioonide tuvastamisel põhineva inimese-roboti suhtluse arendamine

Väitekirja elektrooniline versioon ei sisalda publikatsiooneÜks afektiivse arvutiteaduse peamistest huviobjektidest on mitmemodaalne emotsioonituvastus, mis leiab rakendust peamiselt inimese-arvuti interaktsioonis. Emotsiooni äratundmiseks uuritakse nendes süsteemides nii inimese näoilmeid kui kakõnet. Käesolevas töös uuritakse inimese emotsioonide ja nende avaldumise visuaalseid ja akustilisi tunnuseid, et töötada välja automaatne multimodaalne emotsioonituvastussüsteem. Kõnest arvutatakse mel-sageduse kepstri kordajad, helisignaali erinevate komponentide energiad ja prosoodilised näitajad. Näoilmeteanalüüsimiseks kasutatakse kahte erinevat strateegiat. Esiteks arvutatakse inimesenäo tähtsamate punktide vahelised erinevad geomeetrilised suhted. Teiseks võetakse emotsionaalse sisuga video kokku vähendatud hulgaks põhikaadriteks, misantakse sisendiks konvolutsioonilisele tehisnärvivõrgule emotsioonide visuaalsekseristamiseks. Kolme klassifitseerija väljunditest (1 akustiline, 2 visuaalset) koostatakse uus kogum tunnuseid, mida kasutatakse õppimiseks süsteemi viimasesetapis. Loodud süsteemi katsetati SAVEE, Poola ja Serbia emotsionaalse kõneandmebaaside, eNTERFACE’05 ja RML andmebaaside peal. Saadud tulemusednäitavad, et võrreldes olemasolevatega võimaldab käesoleva töö raames loodudsüsteem suuremat täpsust emotsioonide äratundmisel. Lisaks anname käesolevastöös ülevaate kirjanduses väljapakutud süsteemidest, millel on võimekus tunda äraemotsiooniga seotud ̆zeste. Selle ülevaate eesmärgiks on hõlbustada uute uurimissuundade leidmist, mis aitaksid lisada töö raames loodud süsteemile ̆zestipõhiseemotsioonituvastuse võimekuse, et veelgi enam tõsta süsteemi emotsioonide äratundmise täpsust.Automatic multimodal emotion recognition is a fundamental subject of interest in affective computing. Its main applications are in human-computer interaction. The systems developed for the foregoing purpose consider combinations of different modalities, based on vocal and visual cues. This thesis takes the foregoing modalities into account, in order to develop an automatic multimodal emotion recognition system. More specifically, it takes advantage of the information extracted from speech and face signals. From speech signals, Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, filter-bank energies and prosodic features are extracted. Moreover, two different strategies are considered for analyzing the facial data. First, facial landmarks' geometric relations, i.e. distances and angles, are computed. Second, we summarize each emotional video into a reduced set of key-frames. Then they are taught to visually discriminate between the emotions. In order to do so, a convolutional neural network is applied to the key-frames summarizing the videos. Afterward, the output confidence values of all the classifiers from both of the modalities are used to define a new feature space. Lastly, the latter values are learned for the final emotion label prediction, in a late fusion. The experiments are conducted on the SAVEE, Polish, Serbian, eNTERFACE'05 and RML datasets. The results show significant performance improvements by the proposed system in comparison to the existing alternatives, defining the current state-of-the-art on all the datasets. Additionally, we provide a review of emotional body gesture recognition systems proposed in the literature. The aim of the foregoing part is to help figure out possible future research directions for enhancing the performance of the proposed system. More clearly, we imply that incorporating data representing gestures, which constitute another major component of the visual modality, can result in a more efficient framework