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An important task in human-computer interaction is to rank speech samples according to their expressive content. A preference learning framework is appropriate for obtaining an emotional rank for a set of speech samples. However, obtaining reliable labels for training a preference learning framework is a challenging task. Most existing databases provide sentence-level absolute attribute scores annotated by multiple raters, which have to be transformed to obtain preference labels. Previous studies have shown that evaluators anchor their absolute assessments on previously annotated samples. Hence, this study proposes a novel formulation for obtaining preference learning labels by only considering annotation trends assigned by a rater to consecutive samples within an evaluation session. The experiments show that the use of the proposed anchor-based ordinal labels leads to significantly better performance than models trained using existing alternative labels.
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Preference-Learning with Qualitative Agreement for Sentence Level Emotional Annotations
to inconsistencies between annotators. The low inter-evaluator agreement arises due to the complex nature of emotions. Conventional approaches average scores provided by multiple annotators. While this approach reduces the influence of dissident annotations, previous studies have showed the value of considering individual evaluations to better capture the underlying ground-truth. One of these approaches is the qualitative agreement (QA) method, which provides an alternative framework that captures the inherent trends amongst the annotators. While previous studies have focused on using the QA method for time-continuous annotations from a fixed number of annotators, most emotional databases are annotated with attributes at the sentence-level (e.g., one global score per sentence). This study proposes a novel formulation based on the QA framework to estimate reliable sentence-level annotations for preferencelearning. The proposed relative labels between pairs of sentences capture consistent trends across evaluators. The experimental evaluation shows that preference-learning methods to rank-order emotional attributes trained with the proposed QAbased labels achieve significantly better performance than the same algorithms trained with relative scores obtained by averaging absolute scores across annotators. These results show the benefits of QA-based labels for preference-learning using sentence-level annotations.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1453781
- PAR ID:
- 10099692
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Interspeech 2018
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 252 to 256
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2018-2478
