Detecting Vocal Irony

We describe a data collection for vocal expression of ironic utterances and anger based on an Android app that was specifically developed for this study. The main aim of the investigation is to find evidence for a non-verbal expression of irony. A data set of 937 utterances was collected and labeled by six listeners for irony and anger. The automatically recognized textual content was labeled for sentiment. We report on experiments to classify ironic utterances based on sentiment and tone-of-voice. Baseline results show that an ironic voice can be detected automatically solely based on acoustic features in 69.3 UAR (unweighted average recall) and anger with 64.1 UAR. The performance drops by about 4% when it is calculated with a leave-one-speaker-out cross validation.

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