IBM Israel Research Seminars

Emotions are an important part of our life and our interactions with other people. Humans have several different modalities through which they can express them: facial expressions,gestures, and of course - speech. Though many aspects of speech (e.g., in the engineering world:recognition, synthesis, coding) have been the subject of extensive research, the expression of emotion in speech has received much less attention. In recent years there has been a growing interest in this field, which has proved to be more elusive than many researchers initially thought.

In this talk I'll give an overview of the typical problems involved in this type of research, and approaches towards resolving them. Avoiding some of the major philosphical questions, such as "what are emotions?" and "why do we have emotions?" - I'll discuss some slightly more prosaic issues which are central to anyone working in this area: methods of classifying emotions and methods for obtaining emotional speech. I'll then discuss the current state of knowledge regarding how emotions actually manifest themselves in speech, and how good we are (both people and computers) at identifying them.

Speakers Bio
Dr. Noam Amir is a lecturer (assistant professor) at the department of Communication Disorders in Tel-Aviv University. He received his D.Sc, M.Sc. and B.Sc. from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa, Israel, in the field of Electrical Engineering. He spent 2 years as a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratoire d'Acoustique de l'Universite du Maine, in Le Mans, France. His research has always been interdisciplinary in nature, on the frontier between acoustics, speech and signal processing. Currently his research interests are the manifestation of emotions and depression in speech, accumulation and analysis of spontaneous speech corpora, various aspects of wave propagation in electromagnetic and acoustic waveguides, and the acoustics of musical instruments.

Part of the emotional speech research is conducted by Dr. Noam Amir in the framework of Humaine (Human-Machine Interaction Network on Emotion) Network of Excellence in the EU's Sixth Framework Programme.