Automatic speech-based affect recognition of individuals in dyadic
conversation is a challenging task, in part because of its heavy reliance on
manual pre-processing. Traditional approaches frequently require hand-crafted
speech features and segmentation of speaker turns. In this work, we design
end-to-end deep learning methods to recognize each person's affective
expression in an audio stream with two speakers, automatically discovering
features and time regions relevant to the target speaker's affect. We integrate
a local attention mechanism into the end-to-end architecture and compare the
performance of three attention implementations -- one mean pooling and two
weighted pooling methods. Our results show that the proposed weighted-pooling
attention solutions are able to learn to focus on the regions containing target
speaker's affective information and successfully extract the individual's
valence and arousal intensity. Here we introduce and use a "dyadic affect in
multimodal interaction - parent to child" (DAMI-P2C) dataset collected in a
study of 34 families, where a parent and a child (3-7 years old) engage in
reading storybooks together. In contrast to existing public datasets for affect
recognition, each instance for both speakers in the DAMI-P2C dataset is
annotated for the perceived affect by three labelers. To encourage more
research on the challenging task of multi-speaker affect sensing, we make the
annotated DAMI-P2C dataset publicly available, including acoustic features of
the dyads' raw audios, affect annotations, and a diverse set of developmental,
social, and demographic profiles of each dyad.Comment: Accepted by the 2020 International Conference on Multimodal
Interaction (ICMI'20