Cross-modal analysis of speech, gestures, gaze and facial expressions : COST Action 2102 International Conference, Prague, Czech Republic, October 15-18, 2008 ; revised selected and invited papers

This book constitutes the peer-reviewed post-conference proceedings of the Second COST Action 2102 International Conference on Cross-Modal Analysis of Speech, Gestures,Gaze and Facial Expressions held in Prague, Czech Republic during October 15-18, 2008. The 39 peer-reviewed papers presented are organized in three sections. The first section “Emotion and ICT,” deals with themes related to the crossfertilization between studies on ICT practices of use and cross-modal analysis of verbal and nonverbal communication. The second section, “Verbal and Nonverbal Features of Computational Phonetics,” presents original studies devoted to the modelling of verbal and nonverbal phonetics. The third section, “Algorithmic and Theoretical Analysis of Multimodal Interfaces,” presents theoretical and practical implementations of original studies devoted to the analysis of speech, gestures, face and head movements as well as to learning issues in human–computer interaction and to algorithmic solutions for noise environments in human–machine exchanges. Front Matter....Pages - Cross-Fertilization between Studies on ICT Practices of Use and Cross-Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication....Pages 1-4 Theories without Heart....Pages 5-17 Prosodic Characteristics and Emotional Meanings of Slovak Hot-Spot Words....Pages 18-27 Affiliations, Emotion and the Mobile Phone....Pages 28-41 Polish Emotional Speech Database – Recording and Preliminary Validation....Pages 42-49 Towards a Framework of Critical Multimodal Analysis: Emotion in a Film Trailer....Pages 50-62 Biosignal Based Emotion Analysis of Human-Agent Interactions....Pages 63-75 Emotional Aspects in User Experience with Interactive Digital Television: A Case Study on Dyslexia Rehabilitation....Pages 76-89 Investigation of Normalised Time of Increasing Vocal Fold Contact as a Discriminator of Emotional Voice Type....Pages 90-97 Evaluation of Speech Emotion Classification Based on GMM and Data Fusion....Pages 98-105 Spectral Flatness Analysis for Emotional Speech Synthesis and Transformation....Pages 106-115 Voice Pleasantness of Female Voices and the Assessment of Physical Characteristics....Pages 116-125 Technical and Phonetic Aspects of Speech Quality Assessment: The Case of Prosody Synthesis....Pages 126-132 Syntactic Doubling: Some Data on Tuscan Italian....Pages 133-148 Perception of Czech in Noise: Stability of Vowels....Pages 149-161 Challenges in Segmenting the Czech Lateral Liquid....Pages 162-172 Implications of Acoustic Variation for the Segmentation of the Czech Trill /r/....Pages 173-181 Voicing in Labial Plosives in Czech....Pages 182-189 Normalization of the Vocalic Space....Pages 190-200 Gaze Behaviors for Virtual Crowd Characters....Pages 201-213 Gestural Abstraction and Restatement: From Iconicity to Metaphor....Pages 214-226 Preliminary Prosodic and Gestural Characteristics of Instructing Acts in Polish Task-Oriented Dialogues....Pages 227-238 Polish Children’s Gesticulation in Narrating (Re-telling) a Cartoon....Pages 239-247 Prediction of Learning Abilities Based on a Cross-Modal Evaluation of Non-verbal Mental Attributes Using Video-Game-Like Interfaces....Pages 248-265 Automatic Sentence Modality Recognition in Children’s Speech, and Its Usage Potential in the Speech Therapy....Pages 266-275 Supporting Engagement and Floor Control in Hybrid Meetings....Pages 276-290 Behavioral Consistency Extraction for Face Verification....Pages 291-305 Protecting Face Biometric DCT Templates by Means of Pseudo-random Permutations....Pages 306-314 Facial Expressions Recognition from Image Sequences....Pages 315-323 Czech Artificial Computerized Talking Head George....Pages 324-330 An Investigation into Audiovisual Speech Correlation in Reverberant Noisy Environments....Pages 331-343 Articulatory Speech Re-synthesis: Profiting from Natural Acoustic Speech Data....Pages 344-355 A Blind Source Separation Based Approach for Speech Enhancement in Noisy and Reverberant Environment....Pages 356-367 Quantitative Analysis of the Relative Local Speech Rate....Pages 368-376 Czech Spontaneous Speech Collection and Annotation: The Database of Technical Lectures....Pages 377-385 BSSGUI – A Package for Interactive Control of Blind Source Separation Algorithms in MATLAB....Pages 386-398 Accuracy Analysis of Generalized Pronunciation Variant Selection in ASR Systems....Pages 399-408 Analysis of the Possibilities to Adapt the Foreign Language Speech Recognition Engines for the Lithuanian Spoken Commands Recognition....Pages 409-422 MLLR Transforms Based Speaker Recognition in Broadcast Streams....Pages 423-431 Back Matter....Pages - This volume brings together the peer-reviewed contributions of the participants at the COST 2102 International Conference on “Cross-Modal Analysis of Speech, Gestures, Gaze and Facial Expressions” held in Prague, Czech Republic, October 15–18, 2008. The conference was sponsored by COST (European Cooperation in the Field of Scientific and Technical Research, www. cost. esf. org/domains_actions/ict) in the - main of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for disseminating the research advances developed within COST Action 2102: “Cross-Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication” http://cost2102. cs. stir. ac. uk. COST 2102 research networking has contributed to modifying the conventional theoretical approach to the cross-modal analysis of verbal and nonverbal communi- tion changing the concept of face to face communication with that of body to body communication as well as developing the idea of embodied information. Information is no longer the result of a difference in perception and is no longer measured in terms of quantity of stimuli, since the research developed in COST 2102 has proved that human information processing is a nonlinear process that cannot be seen as the sum of the numerous pieces of information available. Considering simply the pieces of inf- mation available, results in a model of the receiver as a mere decoder, and produces a huge simplification of the communication process. This book constitutes the peer-reviewed post-conference proceedings of the Second COST Action 2102 International Conference on Cross-Modal Analysis of Speech, Gestures, Gaze and Facial Expressions held in Prague, Czech Republic during October 15-18, 2008. The 39 peer-reviewed papers presented are organized in three sections. The first section "Emotion and ICT," deals with themes related to the crossfertilization between studies on ICT practices of use and cross-modal analysis of verbal and nonverbal communication. The second section, "Verbal and Nonverbal Features of Computational Phonetics," presents original studies devoted to the modelling of verbal and nonverbal phonetics. The third section, "Algorithmic and Theoretical Analysis of Multimodal Interfaces," presents theoretical and practical implementations of original studies devoted to the analysis of speech, gestures, face and head movements as well as to learning issues in human-computer interaction and to algorithmic solutions for noise environments in human-machine exchanges