Fuzzy emotion recognition in natural speech dialogue

This paper describes the realization of a natural speech dialogue for the robot head MEXI with focus on its emotion recognition. Specific for MEXI is that it can recognize emotions from natural speech and also produce natural speech output with emotional prosody. For recognizing emotions from the prosody of natural speech we use a fuzzy rule based approach. Since MEXI often communicates with well known persons but also with unknown humans, for instance at exhibitions, we realized a speaker-dependent mode as well as a speaker-independent mode in the prosody based emotion recognition. A key point of our approach is that it automatically selects the most significant features from a set of twenty analyzed features based on a training data base of speech samples. This is important according to our results, since the set of significant features differs considerably between the distinguished emotions. With our approach we reached average recognition rates of 84% in speaker-dependent mode and 60% in speaker-independent mode.

[1]  Bernd Kleinjohann,et al.  MEXI: Machine with Emotionally eXtended Intelligence , 2003, HIS.

[2]  E. Vesterinen,et al.  Affective Computing , 2009, Encyclopedia of Biometrics.

[3]  Valery A. Petrushin,et al.  EMOTION IN SPEECH: RECOGNITION AND APPLICATION TO CALL CENTERS , 1999 .

[4]  Valery A. Petrushin.  Creating Emotion Recognition Agents for Speech Signal , 2002 .

[5]  Hisao Ishibuchi,et al.  A study on generating fuzzy classification rules using histograms , 1998, 1998 Second International Conference. Knowledge-Based Intelligent Electronic Systems. Proceedings KES'98 (Cat. No.98EX111).

[6]  Alicia D. Boozer.  Characterization of emotional speech in human-computer dialogues , 2003 .

[7]  Pierre-Yves Oudeyer,et al.  The production and recognition of emotions in speech: features and algorithms , 2003, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[8]  Albino Nogueiras,et al.  Speech emotion recognition using hidden Markov models , 2001, INTERSPEECH.

[9]  Roddy Cowie,et al.  Automatic recognition of emotion from voice: a rough benchmark , 2000 .

[10]  Klaus R. Scherer,et al.  Vocal communication of emotion: A review of research paradigms , 2003, Speech Commun..

[11]  Nils J. Nilsson,et al.  Artificial Intelligence: A New Synthesis , 1997 .

[12]  Frank Dellaert,et al.  Recognizing emotion in speech , 1996, Proceeding of Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. ICSLP '96.

[13]  Illah R. Nourbakhsh,et al.  A survey of socially interactive robots , 2003, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[14]  Oudeyer Pierre-Yves,et al.  The production and recognition of emotions in speech: features and algorithms , 2003 .

[15]  Pierre-Yves Oudeyer,et al.  Erratum to: "The production and recognition of emotions in speech: features and algorithms": [Int. J. Hum.-Comput. Stud 59 (2003) 157] , 2005, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..