Emotion Detection from Speech to Enrich Multimedia Content

The paper describes an experimental study on the detection of emotion from speech. As computer based characters such as avatars and virtual chat faces become more common, the use of emotion to drive the expression of the virtual characters become more important. The study utilizes a corpus containing emotional speech with 721 short utterances expressing four emotions: anger, happiness, sadness, and the neutral (unemotional) state, which were captured manually from movies and teleplays. We introduce a new concept to evaluate emotions in speech. Emotions are so complex that most speech sentences cannot be precisely assigned into a particular emotion category; however, most emotional states nevertheless can be described as a mixture of multiple emotions. Based on this concept we have trained SVMs (support vector machines) to recognize utterances within these four categories and developed an agent that can recognize and express emotions.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: PCM
• Authors: Feng Yu, Eric Chang, Ying-Qing Xu, Heung-Yeung Shum
• Keywords: Emotion, Emotional Speech, Multimedia, Particular Emotion Category, PCM 2001