Abstract-In this paper, we present first results on applying a personality assessment paradigm to speech input, and comparing human and automatic performance on this task. We cue a professional speaker to produce speech using different personality profiles and encode the resulting vocal personality impressions in terms of the Big Five NEO-FFI personality traits. We then have human raters, who do not know the speaker, estimate the five factors. We analyze the recordings using signal-based acoustic and prosodic methods and observe high consistency between the acted personalities, the raters' assessments, and initial automatic classification results. This presents a first step towards being able to handle personality traits in speech, which we envision will be used in future voice-based communication between humans and machines.

The present study elaborates on the exploitation of both linguistic and acoustic feature modeling for anger classification. In terms of acoustic modeling we generate statistics from acoustic audio descriptors, e.g. pitch, loudness, spectral characteristics. Ranking our features we see that loudness and MFCC seems most promising for all databases. For the English database also pitch features are important. In terms of linguistic modeling we apply probabilistic and entropy-based models of words and phrases, e.g. Bag-of-Words (BOW), Term Frequency (TF), Term FrequencyInverse Document Frequency (TF.IDF) and the Self-Referential Information (SRI). SRI clearly outperforms vector space models. Modeling phrases slightly improves the scores. After classification of both acoustic and linguistic information on separated levels we fuse information on decision level adding confidences. We compare the obtained scores on three different databases. Two databases are taken from the IVR customer care domain, another database accounts for a WoZ data collection. All corpora are of realistic speech condition. We observe promising results for the IVR databases while the WoZ database shows overall lower scores. In order to provide comparability in between the results we evaluate classification success using the f1 measurement in addition to overall accuracy figures. As a result, acoustic modeling clearly outperforms linguistic modeling. Fusion slightly improves overall scores. With a baseline of approximately 60% accuracy and .40 f1-meaurement by constant majority class voting we obtain an accuracy of 75% with respective .70 f1 for the WoZ database. For the IVR databases we obtain approximately 79% accuracy with respective .78 f1 over a baseline of 60% accurracy with respective .38 f1.

In this paper, we present first results on applying a personality assessment paradigm to speech input, and comparing human and automatic performance on this task. We cue a professional speaker to produce speech using different personality profiles and encode the resulting vocal personality impressions in terms of the Big Five NEO-FFI personality traits. We then have human raters, who do not know the speaker, estimate the five factors. We analyze the recordings using signal-based acoustic and prosodic methods and observe high consistency between the acted personalities, the raters' assessments, and initial automatic classification results. This presents a first step towards being able to handle personality traits in speech, which we envision will be used in future voice-based communication between humans and machines.