Prosody Analysis for Speaker Affect Determination

Introduction Speech is a complex waveform containing verbal (e.g. phoneme, syllable, and word) and nonverbal (e.g. speaker identity, emotional state, and tone) information. Both the verbal and nonverbal aspects of speech are extremely important in interpersonal communication and human-machine interaction. However, work in machine perception of speech has focused primarily on the verbal, or content-oriented, goals of speech recognition, speech compression, and speech labeling. Usage of nonverbal information has been limited to speaker identification applications. While the success of research in these areas is well documented, this success is fundamentally limited by the effect of nonverbal information on the speech waveform. The extralinguistic aspect of speech is considered a source of variability that theoretically can be minimized with an appropriate preprocessing technique; determination of such robust techniques is however, far from trivial.