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Depression detection from speech continues to attract significant research attention but remains a major challenge, particularly when the speech is acquired from diverse smartphones in natural environments. Analysis methods based on vocal tract coordination have shown great promise in depression and cognitive impairment detection for quantifying relationships between features over time through eigenvalues of multi-scale cross-correlations.

In this paper, we consider 2-class and 3-class classification problems for classifying patients with Amyotropic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), Parkinson’s Disease (PD) and Healthy Controls (HC) using a CNN-LSTM network. Classification performance is examined for three different tasks, namely, Spontaneous speech (SPON), Diadochoki-netic rate (DIDK) and Sustained Phonation (PHON). Experiments are conducted using speech data recorded from 60 ALS, 60 PD and60 HC subjects. Classification using SVM and DNN are considered baseline schemes.

When emotion recognition systems are used in new domains, the classification performance usually drops due to mismatches between training and testing conditions. Annotations of new data in the new domain is expensive and time demanding. Therefore, it is important to design strategies that efficiently use limited amount of new data to improve the robustness of the classification system. The use of ensembles is an attractive solution, since they can be built to perform well across different mismatches. The key challenge is to create ensembles that are diverse.

The performance of speech emotion classifiers greatly degrade when the training conditions do not match the testing conditions. This problem is observed in cross-corpora evaluations, even when the corpora are similar. The lack of generalization is particularly problematic when the emotion classifiers are used in real applications. This study addresses this problem by combining active learning (AL) and supervised domain adaptation (DA) using an elegant approach for support vector machine (SVM).

Deep neural networks have been proven to be very effective in various classification problems and show great promise for emotion recognition from speech. Studies have proposed various architectures that further improve the performance of emotion recognition systems. However, there are still various open questions regarding the best approach to building a speech emotion recognition system. Would the system’s performance improve if we have more labeled data? How much do we benefit from data augmentation? What activation and regularization schemes are more beneficial?

The ability to identify speech with similar emotional content is valuable to many applications, including speech retrieval, surveil- lance, and emotional speech synthesis. While current formulations in speech emotion recognition based on classification or regression are not appropriate for this task, solutions based on preference learn- ing offer appealing approaches for this task. This paper aims to find speech samples that are emotionally similar to an anchor speech sample provided as a query. This novel formulation opens interest- ing research questions.

This study introduces a method to design a curriculum for machine-learning to maximize the efficiency during the training process of deep neural networks (DNNs) for speech emotion recognition. Previous studies in other machine-learning problems have shown the benefits of training a classifier following a curriculum where samples are gradually presented in increasing level of difficulty. For speech emotion recognition, the challenge is to establish a natural order of difficulty in the training set to create the curriculum.

Non-speech sounds (cough, wheeze) are typically known to perform better than speech sounds for asthmatic and healthy subject
classification. In this work, we use sustained phonations of speech sounds, namely, /A:/, /i:/, /u:/, /eI/, /oU/, /s/, and /z/ from 47 asthmatic and 48 healthy controls. We consider INTERSPEECH 2013 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge baseline (ISCB)

Voice activity detection (VAD) is an integral part of speech processing for real world problems, and a lot of work has been done to improve VAD performance. Of late, deep neural networks have been used to detect the presence of speech and this has offered tremendous gains. Unfortunately, these efforts have been either restricted to feed-forward neural networks that do not adequately capture frequency and temporal correlations, or the recurrent architectures have not been adequately tested in noisy environments.