We described Dublin City University (DCU)’s participation in the Search sub-task of the Search and Hyperlinking Task at MediaEval 2014. Exploratory experiments were carried out to investigate the utility of prosodic prominence features in the task of retrieving relevant video segments from a collection of BBC videos. Normalised acoustic correlates of loudness, pitch, and duration were incorpora...

In this paper we study the effectiveness of prosodic features for speaker verification. We hypothesize that prosody is linked to linguistic units such as syllables and prosodic features can be better represented with reference to the syllabic sequence. For extracting prosodic features, speech is segmented into syllablelike regions using the knowledge of vowel onset points (VOP). We use a techni...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to examine relationships between prosodic speech cues and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) severity, hypothesizing a mutually interactive relationship between the speech characteristics of the psychologist and the child. The authors objectively quantified acoustic-prosodic cues of the psychologist and of the child with ASD during spontaneous interaction, esta...

The ability for humans to understand and process the emotional content of speech is unsurpassed by simulated intelligent agents. Beyond the linguistic content of speech are the underlying prosodic features naturally understood by humans. The goal of emotional speech processing systems is to extract and classify human speech for these so called paralinguistic elements. Presented here is a proof-...

Children seem able to efficiently interpret a variety of linguistic cues during speech comprehension, yet have difficulty interpreting sources of nonlinguistic and paralinguistic information that accompany speech. The current study asked whether (paralinguistic) voice-activated role knowledge is rapidly interpreted in coordination with a linguistic cue (a sentential action) during speech compre...

The past decade has witnessed an explosion of studies comparing speech rhythm across various language varieties, many using the Pairwise Variability Index (PVI, ‎[6]). This renewal of interest in the cross-linguistic typology of prosodic rhythm has been accompanied by cautions that common acoustic measures of rhythm are highly variable between speakers (‎[5]). This paper introduces evidence tha...

Information about the state and planning of the speaker is obscured in traditional classifications of disfluencies which are generally at the word level. This study delves into the acoustic and prosodic information of repetitions, one of the most common disfluencies. A hierarchical clustering of prosodic features reveals three subsets of repetitions, each reflecting different problems in planning.

This paper presents details and progress of the JST/CREST ESP Project, part of the “Information Technology for Life in an Advanced Media Society” series of research projects. The purpose of the research is to determine the acoustic variables that indicate different attitudes and emotions in speech and to map these to linguistic objects and frameworks so that a model of the paralinguistic struct...

We use a corpus of spontaneous interview speech to investigate the relationship between the distributional and prosodic characteristics of silent and filled pauses and the intent of an interviewee to deceive an interviewer. Our data suggest that the use of pauses correlates more with truthful than with deceptive speech, and that prosodic features extracted from filled pauses themselves as well ...

A solution is proposed for rapidly adapting prosodic models to a new voice or a new application. First, a prosodic alphabet that is supported by linguistic knowledge is identified at the acoustic level. The observation of the realisation of prosodic events on the acoustic corpus allows classes of breaks, F0 shapes and accents to be constructed and automatic transcription rules to be written. Th...