More than a decade has passed since research on automatic recognition of emotion from speech has become a new field of research in line with its 'big brothers' speech and speaker recognition. This article attempts to provide a short overview on where we are today, how we got there and what this can reveal us on where to go next and how we could arrive there. In a first part, we address the basic phenomenon reflecting the last fifteen years, commenting on databases, modelling and annotation, the unit of analysis and prototypicality. We then shift to automatic processing including discussions on features, classification, robustness, evaluation, and implementation and system integration. From there we go to the first comparative challenge on emotion recognition from speech -the INTERSPEECH 2009 Emotion Challenge, organised by (part of) the authors, including the description of the Challenge's database, Sub-Challenges, participants and their approaches, the winners, and the fusion of results to the actual learnt lessons before we finally address the ever-lasting problems and future promising attempts.Keywords: emotion, affect, automatic classification, feature types, feature selection, noise robustness, adaptation, standardisation, usability, evaluation Setting the SceneThis special issue will address new approaches towards dealing with the processing of realistic emotions in speech, and this overview article will give an account of the state-of-the-art, of the lacunas in this field, and of promising approaches towards overcoming shortcomings in modelling and recognising realistic emotions. We will also report on the first emotion challenge at INTERSPEECH 2009, constituting the initial impetus of this special issue; to end with, we want to sketch future strategies and applications, trying to answer the question 'Where to go from here?'The article is structured as follows: we first deal with the basic phenomenon briefly reflecting the last fifteen years, commenting on databases, modelling and annotation, the unit of analysis and prototypicality. We then proceed to automatic processing (sec. 2) including discussions on features, classification, robustness, evaluation, and implementation and system integration. From there we go to the the first Emotion Challenge (sec. 3) including the description of the Challenge's database, Sub-Challenges, participants and their approaches, the winners, and the fusion of results to the lessons learnt, before concluding this article (sec. 4).

The INTERSPEECH 2017 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge addresses three different problems for the first time in research competition under well-defined conditions: In the Addressee sub-challenge, it has to be determined whether speech produced by an adult is directed towards another adult or towards a child; in the Cold sub-challenge, speech under cold has to be told apart from 'healthy' speech; and in the Snoring sub-challenge, four different types of snoring have to be classified. In this paper, we describe these sub-challenges, their conditions, and the baseline feature extraction and classifiers, which include data-learnt feature representations by end-to-end learning with convolutional and recurrent neural networks, and bag-of-audio-words for the first time in the challenge series.

The INTERSPEECH 2016 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge addresses three different problems for the first time in research competition under well-defined conditions: classification of deceptive vs. non-deceptive speech, the estimation of the degree of sincerity, and the identification of the native language out of eleven L1 classes of English L2 speakers. In this paper, we describe these sub-challenges, their conditions, the baseline feature extraction and classifiers, and the resulting baselines, as provided to the participants.

Paralinguistic analysis is increasingly turning into a mainstream topic in speech and language processing. This article aims to provide a broad overview of the constantly growing field by defining the field, introducing typical applications, presenting exemplary resources, and sharing a unified view of the chain of processing. It then presents the first broader Paralinguistic Challenge organised at INTERSPEECH 2010 by the authors including a historical overview of the Challenge tasks of recognising age, gender, and affect, a summary of methods used by the participants, and their results. In addition, we present the new benchmark obtained by fusion of participants' predictions and conclude by discussing ten recent and emerging trends in the analysis of paralinguistics in speech and language.