Temporal Organization in Listeners' Perception of the Speakers' Emotions and Characteristics: A Way to Improve the Automatic Recognition of Emotion-Related States in Human Voice

摘要

We propose to improve the automatic detection and characterization of emotion-related expressions in human voice by an approach based on human auditory perception. In order to determine the temporal hierarchical organization in human perception of the speakers' emotions and characteristics, a listening test has been set up with seventy-two listeners. The corpus was constituted of eighteen voice messages extracted from a real-life application. Message segments of different temporal length have been listened to by listeners who were asked to verbalize their perception. Fourteen meta-categories have been obtained and related to age, gender, regional accent, timbre, personality, emotion, sound quality, expression style and so on. The temporal windows of listening necessary for listeners to perceive and verbalize these categories are defined and could underlie the building of sub-models relevant to the automatic recognition of emotion-related expressions.