Summary of the paper

Title The Influence of the Utterance Length on the Recognition of Aged Voices
Authors Alexander Schmitt, Tim Polzehl, Wolfgang Minker and Jackson Liscombe
Abstract This paper addresses the recognition of elderly callers based on short and narrow-band utterances, which are typical for Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems. Our study is based on 2308 short utterances from a deployed IVR application. We show that features such as speaking rate, jitter and shimmer that are considered as most meaningful ones for determining elderly users underperform when used in the IVR context while pitch and intensity features seem to gain importance. We further demonstrate the influence of the utterance length on the classifier’s performance: for both humans and classifier, the distinction between aged and non-aged voices becomes increasingly difficult the shorter the utterances get. Our setup based on a Support Vector Machine (SVM) with linear kernel reaches a comparably poor performance of 58% accuracy, which can be attributed to an average utterance length of only 1.6 seconds. The automatic distinction between aged and non-aged utterances drops to random when the utterance length falls below 1.2 seconds.
Topics Statistical and machine learning methods, Emotion Recognition/Generation, Person Identification
Full paper The Influence of the Utterance Length on the Recognition of Aged Voices
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Bibtex @InProceedings{SCHMITT10.159,
  author = {Alexander Schmitt and Tim Polzehl and Wolfgang Minker and Jackson Liscombe},
  title = {The Influence of the Utterance Length on the Recognition of Aged Voices},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)},
  year = {2010},
  month = {may},
  date = {19-21},
  address = {Valletta, Malta},
  editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis and Mike Rosner and Daniel Tapias},
  publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)},
  isbn = {2-9517408-6-7},
  language = {english}
 }
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