Can prosody inform sentiment analysis? Experiments on short spoken reviews

While most online content is created using textual interfaces, recent improvements in speech recognition accuracy allows the creation of content through speech. This technology allows users to share reviews about entities of interest without any delay, using mobile devices. This paper builds on the previous work on textual sentiment analysis to investigate whether information in the speech signal can be used to predict sentiment from short spoken reviews. For this purpose we collected a short spoken reviews from 84 speakers. Results show that models trained on features characterizing the review´s pitch significantly outperform a majority class baseline, without textual information. When taking text-based sentiment predictions into account, our results suggest that prosody can alleviate the effect of speech recognition errors on sentiment detection, however a larger dataset is needed to test whether this can be done without harming performance on low word error rates.