Dear List, We would like to announce the "Interspeech 2009 Emotion Challenge" that might be of particular interest to those of you working in the fields of speech processing and affective computing. It features prizes in three disciplines and accepted papers will be presented in a special session at INTERSPEECH 2009. Detailed information can be found at: http://emotion-research.net/sigs/speech-sig/emotion-challenge http://www.interspeech2009.org/conference/specialsessions.php Please do not hesitate to contact us with any additional questions. Thank you and best regards, Bjoern Schuller, Stefan Steidl, Anton Batliner We apologize if you receive this call more than once: Call for Papers -------------------------------------------------------------- INTERSPEECH 2009 Emotion Challenge Feature, Classifier, and Open Performance Comparison for Non-Prototypical Spontaneous Emotion Recognition Organisers: Bjoern Schuller (Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Germany) Stefan Steidl (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany) Anton Batliner (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany) Sponsored by: HUMAINE Association Deutsche Telekom Laboratories The Challenge ------------- The young field of emotion recognition from voice has recently gained considerable interest in Human-Machine Communication, Human-Robot Communication, and Multimedia Retrieval. Numerous studies have been seen in the last decade trying to improve on features and classifiers. However, in comparison to related speech processing tasks such as Automatic Speech and Speaker Recognition, practically no standardised corpora and test-conditions exist to compare performances under exactly the same conditions. Instead, a multiplicity of evaluation strategies employed such as crossvalidation or percentage splits without proper instance definition, prevents exact reproducibility. Further, to face more realistic use-cases, the community is in desperate need of more spontaneous and less prototypical data. In these respects, the INTERSPEECH 2009 Emotion Challenge shall help bridging the gap between excellent research on human emotion recognition from speech and low compatibility of results: the FAU Aibo Emotion Corpus of spontaneous, emotionally coloured speech, and benchmark results of the two most popular approaches will be provided by the organisers. Nine hours of speech (51 children) were recorded at two different schools. This allows for distinct definition of test and training partitions incorporating speaker independence as needed in most real-life settings. The corpus further provides a uniquely detailed transcription of spoken content with word boundaries, non-linguistic vocalisations, emotion labels, units of analysis, etc. Three sub-challenges are addressed in two different degrees of difficulty by using non-prototypical five or two emotion classes (including a garbage model): * The Open Performance Sub-Challenge allows contributors to find their own features with their own classification algorithm. However, they will have to stick to the definition of test and training sets. * In the Feature Sub-Challenge, participants are encouraged to upload their individual best features per unit of analysis with a maximum of 100 per contribution. These features will then be tested by the organisers with equivalent settings in one classification task, and pooled together in a feature selection process. * In the Classifier Sub-Challenge, participants may use a large set of standard acoustic features provided by the organisers for classifier tuning. The labels of the test set will be unknown, but each participant can upload instance predictions to receive the confusion matrix and results up to 25 times. As classes are un-balanced, the measure to optimise will be mean recall. The organisers will not take part in the sub-challenges but provide baselines. Overall, contributions using the provided or an equivalent database are sought in (but not limited to) the areas: * Participation in any of the sub-challenges * Speaker adaptation for emotion recognition * Noise/coding/transmission robust emotion recognition * Effects of prototyping on performance * Confidences in emotion recognition * Contextual knowledge exploitation The results of the Challenge will be presented at a Special Session of Interspeech 2009 in Brighton, UK. Prizes will be awarded to the sub-challenge winners and a best paper. If you are interested and planning to participate in the Emotion Challenge, or if you want to be kept informed about the Challenge, please send the organisers an e-mail to indicate your interest and visit the homepage: http://emotion-research.net/sigs/speech-sig/emotion-challenge ___________________________________________ Dr. Björn Schuller Lecturer Technische Universität München Institute for Human-Machine Communication Theresienstraße 90 Building N1, ground level Room N0135 D-80333 München Germany Fax: ++49 (0)89 289-28535 Phone: ++49 (0)89 289-28548 schuller@xxxxxx www.mmk.ei.tum.de/~sch ___________________________________________ This message is confidential. It may also be privileged or otherwise protected by work product immunity or other legal rules. If you have received it by mistake please let us know by reply and then delete it from your system; you should not copy it or disclose its contents to anyone. 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emotion-challenge-IS09-cfp.pdf
Description: emotion-challenge-IS09-cfp.pdf