The Prosody Module

Abstract

Summary: In multimodal dialogue systems, several input and output modalities are used for user interaction. The most important modality for human computer interaction is speech. Similar to human human interaction, it is necessary in the human computer interaction that the machine recognizes the spoken word chain in the user's utterance. For better communication with the user it is advantageous to recognize his internal emotional state because it is then possible to adapt the dialogue strategy to the situation in order to reduce, for example, anger or uncertainty of the user. In the following sections we describe first the state of the art in emotion and user state recognition with the help of prosody. The next section describes the prosody module. After that we present the experiments and results for recognition of user states. We summarize our results in the last section.