Detecting emotional state of a child in a conversational computer game

The automatic recognition of user’s communicative style within a spoken dialog system framework, including the affective aspects, has received increased attention in the past few years. For dialog systems, it is important to know not only what was said but also how something was communicated, so that the system can engage the user in a richer and more natural interaction. This paper addresses the problem of automatically detecting “frustration”, “politeness”, and “neutral” attitudes from a child’s speech communication cues, elicited in spontaneous dialog interactions with computer characters. Several information sources such as acoustic, lexical, and contextual features, as well as, their combinations are used for this purpose. The study is based on a Wizard-of-Oz dialog corpus of 103 children, 7–14 years of age, playing a voice activated computer game. Three-way classification experiments, as well as, pairwise classification between polite vs. others and frustrat...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: CSL
• Authors: Serdar Yildirim, Shrikanth Narayanan, Alexandros Potamianos
• Keywords: Automated Reasoning, CSL 2011, Dialog, Spontaneous Dialog Interactions, Wizard-of-Oz Dialog Corpus