Interspeech 2010 Special Session on Social Signals in Speech

Interspeech 2010 Special Session on Social Signals in Speech

26 - 30 September 2010 in Makuhari, Japan

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The expressive functions of vocal behavior have been widely investigated and described in the literature. However, most of this research was limited to the investigation of affective states with the prototypical emotions such as anger, disgust, happiness, or the emotional dimensions of arousal and valence, receiving most of the focus. Other expressive dimensions, related to the signaling of social cues in interaction, have received far less attention. Among these expressive dimensions we consider signals of politeness or rudeness, familiarity, (dis-)agreement, rapport, dominance, etcetera, and also of social emotions including being angry at the interlocutor, love and liking, jealousy or flirting, etcetera.

Unraveling

the relation between vocal and social conversational phenomena is relevant for the understanding and automatic analysis of human social signals. As future applications, Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) and spoken dialogue systems can be developed which will be able to behave more human-like and will be able to recognize and display social interactional behavior. This special session aims to create a better understanding of how vocal behavior can be used to signal social cues in interaction. We intend to discuss state-of-the-art research on the relation between vocal behavior and social interaction, and we aim to raise discussions about fundamental issues and future challenges in this emerging domain of Social Signal Processing (SSP).

We invite researchers to contribute to this special session on Social Signals in Speech, a multidisciplinary subject that lies on the interface of speech science, linguistics, social science, signal processing and technology. Topics may include (but are not limited to):

The (automatic) analysis of social interaction, such as

* Group-interaction dynamics

* (Dis)-agreement

* Politeness

* Social status

* Dominance

* Empathy

* Rapport

* Friendliness

* Flirting

* Likeability/attractiveness

* (Social) attitude

* Interactional synchrony

* Alignment

* Social mimicry

* Engagement

* Subjectivity

* Speaker role

in relation to vocal behavior, such as

* Prosody

* Non-lexical vocalizations (e.g., laughter, crying)

* Backchannels

* Floor interaction

* Turn-taking patterns

* Pauses and silences

* Interruptions

* Speech rhythm

* Voice quality

Submission procedure

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Papers (4 pages) for the Special Session on Social Signals in Speech will undergo the regular conference submission and review procedure. Please refer to the main conference website of Interspeech 2010 for full

details:

http://www.interspeech2010.org