22.5127, FYI: Call: INTERSPEECH 2012 Speaker Trait Challenge

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LINGUIST List: Vol-22-5127. Tue Dec 20 2011. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 22.5127, FYI: Call: INTERSPEECH 2012 Speaker Trait Challenge

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1)
Date: 19-Dec-2011
From: Björn Schuller [schuller at tum.de]
Subject: Call: INTERSPEECH 2012 Speaker Trait Challenge


-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 10:58:23
From: Björn Schuller [schuller at tum.de]
Subject: Call: INTERSPEECH 2012 Speaker Trait Challenge

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Call for Participation
INTERSPEECH 2012 
Speaker Trait Challenge 

Personality, Likability, Pathology

http://emotion-research.net/sigs/speech-sig/is12-speaker-trait-
challenge

The Challenge

Whereas the first open comparative challenges in the field of 
paralinguistics targeted more ''conventional'' phenomena such as 
emotion, age, and gender, there still exists a multiplicity of not yet 
covered, but highly relevant speaker states and traits. In the last 
instalment, we focused on speaker states, namely sleepiness and 
intoxication. Consequently, we now focus on speaker traits. The 
INTERSPEECH 2012 Speaker Trait Challenge broadens the scope by 
addressing three less researched speaker traits: the computational 
analysis of personality, likability, and pathology in speech. Apart from 
intelligent and socially competent future agents and robots, main 
applications are found in the medical domain.

In these respects, the INTERSPEECH 2012 Speaker Trait Challenge 
shall help bridging the gap between excellent research on 
paralinguistic information in spoken language and low compatibility of 
results.

Three Sub-Challenges are addressed:

- In the Personality Sub-Challenge, the personality of a speaker has to 
be determined based on acoustics potentially including linguistics for 
the OCEAN five personality dimensions, each mapped onto two 
classes.

- In the Likability Sub-Challenge, the likability of a speaker's voice has 
to be determined by a learning algorithm and acoustic features. While 
the annotation provides likability in multiple levels, the classification 
task is binarised.

- In the Pathology Sub-Challenge, the intelligibility of a speaker has to 
be determined by a classification algorithm and acoustic features.

The measures of competition will be Unweighted Average Recall of the 
two classes. Transcription of the train and development sets will be 
known. All Sub-Challenges allow contributors to find their own features 
with their own machine learning algorithm. However, a standard feature 
set will be provided per corpus that may be used. Participants will have 
to stick to the definition of training, development, and test sets. They 
may report on results obtained on the development set, but have only 
five trials to upload their results on the test sets, whose labels are 
unknown to them. Each participation will be accompanied by a paper 
presenting the results that undergoes peer-review and has to be 
accepted for the conference in order to participate in the Challenge. 
The organisers preserve the right to re-evaluate the findings, but will 
not participate themselves in the Challenge. Participants are 
encouraged to compete in all Sub-Challenges. 

Overall, contributions using the provided or equivalent data are sought 
in (but not limited to) the following areas:

- Participation in the Personality Sub-Challenge
- Participation in the Likability Sub-Challenge
- Participation in the Pathology Sub-Challenge
- Novel features and algorithms for the analysis of speaker traits
- Unsupervised learning methods for speaker trait analysis
- Perception studies, additional annotation and feature analysis on the 
given sets
- Context exploitation in speaker trait assessment

The results of the Challenge will be presented at Interspeech 2012 in 
Portland, Oregon. Prizes will be awarded to the Sub-Challenge 
winners. If you are interested and planning to participate in the 
Speaker Trait Challenge, or if you want to be kept informed about the 
Challenge, please send the organisers an e-mail to indicate your 
interest and visit the homepage: 

http://emotion-research.net/sigs/speech-sig/is12-speaker-trait-
challenge

Organisers:

Björn Schuller (TUM, Germany)
Stefan Steidl (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
Anton Batliner (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
Elmar Nöth (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
Alessandro Vinciarelli (University of Glasgow, UK)
Felix Burkhardt (Deutsche Telekom, Germany)
Rob van Son (Netherlands Cancer Institute, Netherlands)

If you want to participate, please find the License Agreement at:

http://emotion-research.net/sigs/speech-sig/IS12-STC-Agreement.pdf 



Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics





 





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