Ellen Douglas-Cowie

Postlingually acquired deafness: Speech deterioration and the wider consequences

Based on a study in Belfast, 1980-90, considers the deterioration of speech by a person who has become deaf, as one of the many social and emotional consequences of what is too often treated simply as a disorder of the ear. Emphasizes the cumulative impact of difficulties none of which would be seri

On-line emotion recognition in a 3-D activation-valence-time continuum using acoustic and linguistic cues

For many applications of emotion recognition, such as virtual agents, the system must select responses while the user is speaking. This requires reliable on-line recognition of the user’s affect. However most emotion recognition systems are based on turnwise processing. We present a novel approach to on-line emotion recognition from speech using Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks. Emotion is recognised frame-wise in a two-dimensional valence-activation continuum. In contrast to current state-of-the-art approaches, recognition is performed on low-level signal frames, similar to those used for speech recognition. No statistical functionals are applied to low-level feature contours. Framing at a higher level is therefore unnecessary and regression outputs can be produced in real-time for every low-level input frame. We also investigate the benefits of including linguistic features on the signal frame level obtained by a keyword spotter.