Bayesian-Based Inference of Dialogist's Emotion for Sensitivity Robots

Abstract

We describe a method for sensitivity communication robots which infer their dialogist's emotion. The method is based on the Bayesian approach: by using a Bayesian modeling for prosodic features. In this research, we focus the elements of emotion included in dialogist's voice. Thus, as training datasets for learning Bayesian networks, we extract prosodic feature quantities from emotionally expressive voice data. Our method learns the dependence and its strength between dialogist's utterance and his emotion, by building Bayesian networks. Bayesian information criterion, one of the information theoretical model selection method, is used in the building Bayesian networks. The paper finally proposes a reasoner to infer dialogist's emotion by using a Bayesian network for prosodic features of the dialogist's voice. The paper also reports some empirical reasoning performance.