Humans as feature extractors: Combining prosody and personality perception for improved speaking style recognition

This paper presents experiments where natural and spontaneous cognitive processes, in particular those who lead to the attribution of personality traits to unacquainted people, are used as a natural form of feature extraction. In particular, personality assessments provided by human judges are used as features to distinguish between professional and non-professional speakers. The same task is performed with prosodic features extracted with a fully automatic process for comparison purposes. Furthermore both prosodic features and personality assessments are combined. The results show that the discrimination between professional and non-professional speaking styles can be performed with an accuracy of 87.2% when using prosodic features, of 75.5% when using personality assessments, and of 90.0% when using the combination of the two.