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Getting to the Heart of the Matter: Speech as the Expression of Affect; Rather than Just Text or Language

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Abstract

This paper addresses the current needs for so-called emotion in speech, but points out that the issue is better described as the expression of relationships and attitudes rather than the currently held raw (or big-six) emotional states. From an analysis of more than three years of daily conversational speech, we find the direct expression of emotion to be extremely rare, and contend that when speech technologists say that what we need now is more ‘emotion’ in speech, what they really mean is that the current technologies are too text-based, and that more expression of speaker attitude, affect, and discourse relationships is required.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ATR Network Informatics Labs, Keihanna Science City, Kyoto, Japan

    Nick Campbell

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  1. Nick Campbell
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Correspondence to Nick Campbell.

Additional information

This paper is an extended version of a Keynote Address presented at the Language Resources & Evaluation Conference, Lisbon, May 2004, in memory of Antonio Zampolli.

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Campbell, N. Getting to the Heart of the Matter: Speech as the Expression of Affect; Rather than Just Text or Language. Language Res Eval 39, 109–118 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-005-2699-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-005-2699-y

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