Inferring Stance from Prosody

Citation

Ward, N.G., Carlson, J.C., Fuentes, O., Castan, D., Shriberg, E.E., Tsiartas, A. (2017) Inferring Stance from Prosody. Proc. Interspeech 2017, 1447-1451, DOI: 10.21437/Interspeech.2017-159.

Abstract

Speech conveys many things beyond content, including aspects of stance and attitude that have not been much studied. Considering 14 aspects of stance as they occur in radio news stories, we investigated the extent to which they could be inferred from prosody.  By using time-spread prosodic features and by aggregating local estimates, many aspects of stance were at least somewhat predictable, with results significantly better than chance for many stance aspects, including, across English, Mandarin and Turkish, good, typical, local, background, new information, and relevant to a large group.

Index Terms: information retrieval, filtering, attitudes, sentiment, broadcast news

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