Predicting valence and arousal by aggregating acoustic features for acoustic-linguistic information fusion

This paper presents an evaluation of acoustic feature aggregation and acoustic-linguistic features combination for valence and arousal prediction within a speech. First, acoustic features were aggregated from chunk-based processing for story-based processing. We evaluated mean and maximum aggregation methods for those acoustic features and compared the results with the baseline, which used majority voting aggregation. Second, the extracted acoustic features are combined with linguistic features for predicting valence and arousal categories: low, medium, or high. The unimodal result using acoustic features aggregation showed an improvement over the baseline majority voting on development partition for the same acoustic feature set. The bimodal results (by combining acoustic and linguistic information at the feature level) improved both development and test scores over the official baseline. This combination of acoustic-linguistic information targeted speech-based applications where acoustic and linguistic features can be extracted from the sole speech modality.