Interjections are often used in dialogue communication for expressing a reaction (such as agreement, surprise and disgust) to the interlocutor. Thus, a correct interpretation of the paralinguistic information (intention, attitude or emotion) carried by interjections is important for achieving a smooth dialogue interaction between humans and robots. In the present work, analyses are conducted on...

This paper investigates the way prosody and syntactic structure combine in the perception of prosodic boundaries in French. Based on a 3.5-hour balanced corpus, we first analyse the distribution of boundary types across genres, and then examine the acoustic correlates of prosodic boundaries their relationship to linguistic features (part-of-speech categories and syntactic clauses).

Emotions can be recognized by audible paralinguistic cues in speech. By detecting these paralinguistic cues that can consist of laughter, a trembling voice, coughs, changes in the intonation contour etc., information about the speaker’s state and emotion can be revealed. This paper describes the development of a gender-independent laugh detector with the aim to enable automatic emotion recognit...

The paper presents a novel automatic speaker age and gender identification approach which combines seven different methods t both acoustic and prosodic levels to improve the baseline performance. The three baseline subsystems are (1) Gaussian mixture odel (GMM) based on mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) features, (2) Support vector machine (SVM) based on GMM ean supervectors and (3) SVM...

Speech prosody is a valuable carrier of information. Accents and phrase boundaries have been shown to contribute to syntactic disambiguation, semantic, pragmatic and paralinguistic interpretation, and to convey information about topicality, focus, contrast and information status. This thesis will present and evaluate techniques to detect and classify these prosodic events. The acoustic correlat...

The paralinguistic features, however this conference classifies the “Paralinguistic analysis” as Speaker identification, Keyword/topic spotting, and Language identification, include emotional aspects of voice, which is focused recently on interpersonal communications. Study starts from description and statistics of those features. Among many acoustic characteristics, we investigated features re...

In this paper, a recurrent neural network (RNN) based prosodic modeling method for Mandarin speech-to-text conversion is proposed. The prosodic modeling is performed in the post-processing stage of acoustic decoding and aims at detecting word-boundary cues to assist in linguistic decoding. It employs a simple three-layer RNN to learn the relationship between input prosodic features, extracted f...

We describe the different linguistic and paralinguistic functions of prosody, show how features can be computed that describe the prosodic marking of these functions, and how this knowledge can be used in an automatic speech understanding system. This is done in the context of the speech–to–speech translation system Verbmobil, where prosody is used to segment the user utterance and to find self...

When analysing human spoken communication the focus on the linguistic side lies on speech with its verbal message, whereas the focus on the non-linguistic side usually is on the visually transported information such as gestures and facial expression. However, speech, especially in talk-in-interaction, also features numerous nonverbal vocalisations including various forms of laughter and inhalat...

This paper presents a novel automatic speaker age and gender identification approach which combines five different methods at the acoustic level to improve the baseline performance. The five subsystems are (1) Gaussian mixture model (GMM) system based on mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) features, (2) Support vector machine (SVM) based on GMM mean supervectors, (3) SVM based on GMM maxi...