A computational model for the automatic recognition of affect in speech

Spoken language, in addition to serving as a primary vehicle for externalizing linguistic structures and meaning, acts as a carrier of various sources of information, including back- ground, age, gender, membership in social structures, as well as physiological, pathological and emotional states. These sources of information are more than just ancillary to the main purpose of linguistic communication: Humans react to the various non-linguistic factors en- coded in the speech signal, shaping and adjusting their interactions to satisfy interpersonal and social protocols. Computer science, artificial intelligence and computational linguistics have devoted much active research to systems that aim to model the production and recovery of linguistic lexico-semantic structures from speech. However, less attention has been devoted to systems that model and understand the paralinguistic and extralinguistic information in the signal. As the breadth and nature of human-computer interaction escalates to levels previously reserved for human-to-human communication, there is a growing need to endow computational systems with human-like abilities which facilitate the interaction and make it more natural. Of paramount importance amongst these is the human ability to make inferences regarding the affective content of our exchanges. This thesis proposes a framework for the recognition of affective qualifiers from prosodic- acoustic parameters extracted from spoken language.

Department dc:contributor.department

Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2004

Author dc:creator

• Fernandez, Raul

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Rosalind W. Picard.

• Architecture. Program in Media Arts and Sciences.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/16621

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/16621