Important dates

Submission deadline:

30 April 2010

Conference dates:

26 - 30 September 2010

Submission procedure

Special session papers will undergo the regular main conference submission and review procedure, see

http://www.interspeech2010.org

for full details.

Contact (organisers of the Special Session on Social Signals in Speech)

Khiet Truong

Dirk Heylen

Human Media Interaction, University of Twente

{k.p.truong, d.k.j.heylen}

@ewi.utwente.nl

Download Call for Papers in PDF

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

1. • Group-interaction dynamics
   

2. • (Dis-)agreement
   

3. • Politeness
   

4. • Social status
   

5. • Dominance
   

6. • Empathy
   

7. • Rapport
   

8. • Friendliness
   

9. • Flirting
   

10. • Likeability/attractiveness
    

11. • (Social) attitude
    

12. • Interactional synchrony
    

13. • Alignment
    

14. • Social mimicry
    

15. • Engagement
    

16. • Subjectivity
    

17. • Speaker role
    

in relation to vocal behavior, such as

1. • Prosody
   

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

3. • Backchannels
   

4. • Floor interaction
   

5. •Turn-taking patterns
   

6. • Pauses and silences
   

7. • Interruptions
   

8. • Speech rhythm
   

9. • Voice quality
   

Submission procedure

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

Upon submission, the Special Session on Social Signals in Speech will be available for selection. Presentation format will (most likely) be oral.

Important dates

Paper submission deadline: 30 April 2010

Notification of acceptance/rejection: 2 July 2010

Conference dates: 26-30 September 2010

Websites

Main conference Interspeech 2010: http://www.interspeech2010.org

Special Session on Social Signals in Speech:

http://www.cs.utwente.nl/~truongkp/is2010sssss.html

Social Signal Processing: http://sspnet.eu/

Human Media Interaction, University of Twente: http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/

Session organisers

Khiet Truong and Dirk Heylen

Human Media Interaction, University of Twente

{k.p.truong, d.k.j.heylen}@ewi.utwente.nl

Programme Interspeech 2010 Special Session on Social Signals in Speech - Thursday, 30 September 2010, 10:00-12:00

10:00 - 10:20

1. • Detecting politeness and efficiency in a cooperative social interaction
   

Paul M. Brunet (School of Psychology, Queen's University Belfast)

Marcela Charfuelan (Language Technology Lab, DFKI)

Roderick Cowie (School of Psychology, Queen's University Belfast)

Marc Schroeder (Language Technology Lab, DFKI)

Hastings Donnan (School of History and Anthropology, Queen's University Belfast)

Ellen Douglas-Cowie (School of English, Queen's University Belfast)

10:20 - 10:40

1. • Comparing Measures of Synchrony and Alignment in Dialogue Speech Timing with respect to Turn-taking Activity
   

Nick Campbell (Centre for Language and Communication Studies, Trinity College Dublin)

Stefan Scherer (Institute of Neural Information Processing, University of Ulm)

10:40 - 11:00

1. • Resources for turn competition in overlap in multi-party conversations: Speech rate, pausing and duration
   

Emina Kurtic (Department of Human Communication Sciences, Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield)

Guy J. Brown (Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield)

Bill Wells (Department of Human Communication Sciences, University of Sheffield)

11:00 - 11:20

1. • Disambiguating the functions of conversational sounds with prosody: the case of `yeah'
   

Khiet P. Truong (Human Media Interaction, University of Twente)

Dirk Heylen (Human Media Interaction, University of Twente)

11:20 - 11:40

1. • Prosody and voice quality of vocal social signals: the case of dominance in scenario meetings
   

Marcela Charfuelan (Language Technology Lab, DFKI)

Marc Schroeder (Language Technology Lab, DFKI)

Ingmar Steiner (Language Technology Lab, DFKI)

11:40 - 12:00

1. • The Prosody of Swedish Conversational Grunts
   

D. Neiberg (Center for Speech Technology, KTH)

J. Gustafson (Center for Speech Technology, KTH)