Prosody-based search features in information retrieval
Juhani Toivanen, Tapio Seppänen · 2002
Massive amounts of digital audio material are stored in databases to be accessed via digital networks. A major challenge is how to organise and index this material to best support retrieval applications. Not enough manpower will ever be available to index the terabytes of digital material by hand. Methods for interpreting the complex data automatically or at least semi-automatically must therefore be found. Valuable information in the form of prosodic features can be automatically extracted from the speech signal; computation of these features significantly enhances the automatic interpretation of especially the emotional content of the recording/audio file. In this paper, ways of utilizing prosodic or acoustic features of speech to develop retrieval applications are discussed. Also, the MediaTeam Emotional Speech Corpus is introduced.