DAGA 2010 - Deutsche Gesellschaft für Akustik eV

Programm DAGA 2010 247
Do. 10:10 Gauß B 501 Robuste Spracherkennung
Factors for Linguistic and Prosodic Emotion Recognition
T. Polzehl a ,F.Metze b und A. Schmitt c
a Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, TU Berlin; b SCS/ LTI, Carnegie Mellon
University, Pittsburgh, USA; c Institute of Information Technology, University
of Ulm
This paper reports on robust anger detection from speech utterances.
In order to detect emotion-related user states from speech signals we
compare performances from two essentially different approaches. We
compare the impact of linguistic features, i.e. features taken from the
transcriptions of spoken utterances as obtained by ASR, and prosodic/acoustic
features, i.e. drawn from the audio signal directly, for an
anger classification task. Our databases capture speech from two real
life customer care IVR systems. Both systems share largely the same
domain, however, the challenge of robust speech processing for emotion
classification is motivated by comparing the performance of our features
for both English and German language IVR systems. Finally we explore
the impact of system fusion for more accurate classification results.
Do. 14:00 Gauß B 501 Sprachverarbeitung
Influence of the linguistic complexity in relation to speech material
on non-native speech perception in noise.
A. Warzybok a , K. Wagener b ,T.Brand a und B. Kollmeier a
a Medizinische Physik, Carl-von-Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg; b Hör-
zentrum Oldenburg GmbH
Speech communication in a foreign language is especially difficult in noise.
For non-native listeners (NN) speech intelligibility is not only affected
by masking but also by limited experience with the vocabulary, syntax,
and semantics of the second language (L2). This study investigated how
speech material influences the intelligibility in noise by NN. Speech reception
thresholds were measured for 40 non-native German listeners
using three speech intelligibility tests: the Digit Triplets Test, the Oldenburg
Sentence Test and the Göttingen Sentence Test. The NN participants
differed in their German language skills. In each test performed
significantly worse intelligibility scores were obtained by the NN than by
the native listeners. The largest difference was found in the Göttingen
Sentences which uses daily life sentences. This indicates that intelligibility
of everyday speech is most challenging for NN. Results also showed
that the level of L2 skills is significant for speech reception in noise,
and the differences between groups increased with increasing linguistic
complexity of the speech material. These findings support the expectation
that NN’s speech intelligibility in noise is strongly dependent on the
speech material and listeners skills in L2, and decreases with complexity,
advanced speech stimuli and limited knowledge in L2.