Emotion Recognition from Speech

• Published in: Companion Technology pp. 409 - 428
• Main Authors: Wendemuth, Andreas, Vlasenko, Bogdan, Siegert, Ingo, Böck, Ronald, Schwenker, Friedhelm, Palm, Günther
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 01.01.2017; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Cognitive Technologies
• Subjects: Artificial intelligence; Computational linguistics; User interface design & usability
• ISBN: 3319436643; 9783319436647
• ISSN: 1611-2482; 2197-6635
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-43665-4_20

Spoken language is one of the main interaction patterns in human-human as well as in natural, companion-like human-machine interactions. Speech conveys content, but also emotions and interaction patterns determining the nature and quality of the user’s relationship to his counterpart. Hence, we consider emotion recognition from speech in the wider sense of application in Companion-systems. This requires a dedicated annotation process to label emotions and to describe their temporal evolution in view of a proper regulation and control of a system’s reaction. This problem is peculiar for naturalistic interactions, where the emotional labels are no longer a priori given. This calls for generating and measuring of a reliable ground truth, where the measurement is closely related to the usage of appropriate emotional features and classification techniques. Further, acted and naturalistic spoken data has to be available in operational form (corpora) for the development of emotion classification; we address the difficulties arising from the variety of these data sources. Speaker clustering and speaker adaptation will as well improve the emotional modeling. Additionally, a combination of the acoustical affective evaluation and the interpretation of non-verbal interaction patterns will lead to a better understanding of and reaction to user-specific emotional behavior.