No abstract

Depression is one of the most common mood disorders. Technology has the potential to assist in screening and treating people with depression by robustly modeling and tracking the complex behavioral cues associated with the disorder (e.g., speech, language, facial expressions, head movement, body language). Similarly, robust affect recognition is another challenge which stands to benefit from modeling such cues. The Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge (AVEC) aims toward understanding the two phenomena and modeling their correlation with observable cues across several modalities. In this paper, we use multimodal signal processing methodologies to address the two problems using data from human-computer interactions. We develop separate systems for predicting depression levels and affective dimensions, experimenting with several methods for combining the multimodal information. The proposed depression prediction system uses a feature selection approach based on audio, visual, and linguistic cues to predict depression scores for each session. Similarly, we use multiple systems trained on audio and visual cues to predict the affective dimensions in continuous-time. Our affect recognition system accounts for context during the frame-wise inference and performs a linear fusion of outcomes from the audio-visual systems. For both problems, our proposed systems outperform the videofeature based baseline systems. As part of this work, we analyze the role played by each modality in predicting the target variable and provide analytical insights.

We examine differences in portrayal of characters in movies using psycholinguistic and graph theoretic measures computed directly from screenplays. Differences are examined with respect to characters' gender, race, age and other metadata. Psycholinguistic metrics are extrapolated to dialogues in movies using a linear regression model built on a set of manually annotated seed words. Interesting patterns are revealed about relationships between genders of production team and the gender ratio of characters. Several correlations are noted between gender, race, age of characters and the linguistic metrics.

Research related to computational modeling for machine-based understanding requires ground truth data for training, content analysis, and evaluation. In this paper, we present a multimodal video database, namely COGNIMUSE, annotated with sensory and semantic saliency, events, cross-media semantics, and emotion. The purpose of this database is manifold; it can be used for training and evaluation of event detection and summarization algorithms, for classification and recognition of audio-visual and cross-media events, as well as for emotion tracking. In order to enable comparisons with other computational models, we propose state-of-the-art algorithms, specifically a unified energy-based audio-visual framework and a method for text saliency computation, for the detection of perceptually salient events from videos. Additionally, a movie summarization system for the automatic production of summaries is presented. Two kinds of evaluation were performed, an objective based on the saliency annotation of the database and an extensive qualitative human evaluation of the automatically produced summaries, where we investigated what composes high-quality movie summaries, where both methods verified the appropriateness of the proposed methods. The annotation of the database and the code for the summarization system can be found at

Individuals with serious mental illness experience changes in their clinical states over time that are difficult to assess and that result in increased disease burden and care utilization. It is not known if features derived from speech can serve as a transdiagnostic marker of these clinical states. This study evaluates the feasibility of collecting speech samples from people with serious mental illness and explores the potential utility for tracking changes in clinical state over time. Patients (n = 47) were recruited from a community-based mental health clinic with diagnoses of bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. Patients used an interactive voice response system for at least 4 months to provide speech samples. Clinic providers (n = 13) reviewed responses and provided global assessment ratings. We computed features of speech and used machine learning to create models of outcome measures trained using either population data or an individual's own data over time. The system was feasible to use, recording 1101 phone calls and 117 hours of speech. Most (92%) of the patients agreed that it was easy to use. The individually-trained models demonstrated the highest correlation with provider ratings (rho = 0.78, p<0.001). Population-level models demonstrated statistically significant correlations with provider global assessment ratings (rho = 0.44, p<0.001), future provider ratings (rho = 0.33, p<0.05), BASIS-24 summary score, depression sub score, and self-harm sub score (rho = 0.25,0.25, and 0.28 respectively; p<0.05), and the SF-12 mental health sub score (rho = 0.25, p<0.05), but not with other BASIS-24 or SF-12 sub scores. This study brings together longitudinal collection of objective behavioral markers along with a transdiagnostic, personalized approach for tracking of mental health clinical state in a community-based clinical setting.