This work tests several classification techniques and acoustic features and further combines them using late fusion to classify paralinguistic information for the ComParE 2018 challenge. We use Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) with Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) analysis to select the most informative features for Self-Assessed Affect (SSA) sub-Challenge. We also propose to use raw-waveform convolutional neural networks (CNN) in the context of three paralinguistic sub-challenges. By using combined evaluation split for estimating codebook, we obtain better representation for Bag-of-Audio-Words approach. We preprocess the speech to vocalized segments to improve classification performance. For fusion of our leading classification techniques, we use weighted late fusion approach applied for confidence scores. We use two mismatched evaluation phases by exchanging the training and development sets, and this estimates the optimal fusion weight. Weighted late fusion provides better performance on development sets in comparison with baseline techniques. Raw-waveform techniques perform comparable to the baseline.

This paper presents a raw-waveform neural network and uses it along with a denoising network for clustering in weaklysupervised learning scenarios under extreme noise conditions. Specifically, we consider language independent Automatic Gender Recognition (AGR) on a set of varied noise conditions and Signal to Noise Ratios (SNRs). We formulate the denoising problem as a source separation task and train the system using a discriminative criterion in order to enhance output SNRs. A denoising Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) is first trained on a small subset (roughly one-fifth) of the data for learning a speechspecific mask. The denoised speech signal is then directly fed as input to a raw-waveform convolutional neural network (CNN) trained with denoised speech. We evaluate the standalone performance of denoiser in terms of various signal-to-noise measures and discuss its contribution towards robust AGR. An absolute improvement of 11.06% and 13.33% is achieved by the combined pipeline over the i-vector SVM baseline system for 0 dB and-5 dB SNR conditions, respectively. We further analyse the information captured by the first CNN layer in both noisy and denoised speech.

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