Speaker Appeal in Political Speech - A Single Speaker Study

Ailbhe Cullen

Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Tuesday, June 2, 2015
12:30 p.m., Conference Room 5A

The ability to predict appeal from the voice is valuable both for retrieval of appealing recordings and for detailed analysis of a specific speaker. In this talk we explore the classification of appeal in political speech. in particular we are interested in the effect of situation (parliament, interview, etc.) on the perception and classification of speaker appeal.  Overall speaker appeal (OSA), is measured by combining ratings for six attributes: boring; charismatic; enthusiastic; inspiring; likeable; and persuasive. We demonstrate significant biases in the perception of OSA with respect to situation, which we propose to exploit by training separate models for each situation. Through the combination of situation-specific modelling and the averaging of multiple attributes into the OSA label, we achieve a significant increase in performance, compared to a baseline charisma-detection system.

Bio:

Ailbhe Cullen is a postgraduate student in the Sigmedia research group at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Her work focuses on the analysis and detection of paralinguistic traits (emotion, personality, etc.) from the voice.