Computational paralinguistics aims to infer human emotions, personality traits and behavioural patterns from speech signals. In particular, verbal conflict is an important example of human-interaction behaviour, whose detection would enable monitoring and feedback in a variety of applications. The majority of methods for detection and intensity estimation of verbal conflict apply off-the-shelf classifiers/regressors to generic handcrafted acoustic features. Generating conflict-specific features requires refinement steps and the availability of metadata, such as the number of speakers and their speech overlap duration. Moreover, most techniques treat feature extraction and regression as independent modules, which require separate training and parameter tuning. To address these limitations, we propose the first end-to-end convolutional-recurrent neural network architecture that learns conflict-specific features directly from raw speech waveforms, without using explicit domain knowledge or metadata. Additionally, to selectively focus the model on portions of speech containing verbal conflict instances, we include a global attention interface that learns the alignment between layers of the recurrent network. Experimental results on the SSPNet Conflict Corpus show that our end-to-end architecture achieves state-ofthe-art performance in terms of Pearson Correlation Coefficient.

Multi-modal learning relates information across observation modalities of the same physical phenomenon to leverage complementary information. Most multi-modal machine learning methods require that all the modalities used for training are also available for testing. This is a limitation when signals from some modalities are unavailable or severely degraded. To address this limitation, we aim to improve the testing performance of uni-modal systems using multiple modalities during training only. The proposed multi-modal training framework uses cross-modal translation and correlation-based latent space alignment to improve the representations of a worse performing (or weaker) modality. The translation from the weaker to the better performing (or stronger) modality generates a multi-modal intermediate encoding that is representative of both modalities. This encoding is then correlated with the stronger modality representation in a shared latent space. We validate the proposed framework on the AVEC 2016 dataset (RECOLA) for continuous emotion recognition and show the effectiveness of the framework that achieves state-ofthe-art (uni-modal) performance for weaker modalities.

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Humans express their emotions via facial expressions, voice intonation and word choices. To infer the nature of the underlying emotion, recognition models may use a single modality, such as vision, audio, and text, or a combination of modalities. Generally, models that fuse complementary information from multiple modalities outperform their uni-modal counterparts. However, a successful model that fuses modalities requires components that can effectively aggregate task-relevant information from each modality. As crossmodal attention is seen as an effective mechanism for multi-modal fusion, in this paper we quantify the gain that such a mechanism brings compared to the corresponding self-attention mechanism. To this end, we implement and compare a cross-attention and a selfattention model. In addition to attention, each model uses convolutional layers for local feature extraction and recurrent layers for global sequential modelling. We compare the models using different modality combinations for a 7-class emotion classification task using the IEMOCAP dataset. Experimental results indicate that albeit both models improve upon the state-of-the-art in terms of weighted and unweighted accuracy for tri-and bi-modal configurations, their performance is generally statistically comparable. The code to replicate the experiments is available at https:// github.com/smartcameras/SelfCrossAttn