Günther Palm


2008

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The PIT Corpus of German Multi-Party Dialogues
Petra-Maria Strauß | Holger Hoffmann | Wolfgang Minker | Heiko Neumann | Günther Palm | Stefan Scherer | Harald Traue | Ulrich Weidenbacher
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)

The PIT corpus is a German multi-media corpus of multi-party dialogues recorded in a Wizard-of-Oz environment at the University of Ulm. The scenario involves two human dialogue partners interacting with a multi-modal dialogue system in the domain of restaurant selection. In this paper we present the characteristics of the data which was recorded in three sessions resulting in a total of 75 dialogues and about 14 hours of audio and video data. The corpus is available at http://www.uni-ulm.de/in/pit.

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Emotion Recognition from Speech: Stress Experiment
Stefan Scherer | Hansjörg Hofmann | Malte Lampmann | Martin Pfeil | Steffen Rhinow | Friedhelm Schwenker | Günther Palm
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)

The goal of this work is to introduce an architecture to automatically detect the amount of stress in the speech signal close to real time. For this an experimental setup to record speech rich in vocabulary and containing different stress levels is presented. Additionally, an experiment explaining the labeling process with a thorough analysis of the labeled data is presented. Fifteen subjects were asked to play an air controller simulation that gradually induced more stress by becoming more difficult to control. During this game the subjects were asked to answer questions, which were then labeled by a different set of subjects in order to receive a subjective target value for each of the answers. A recurrent neural network was used to measure the amount of stress contained in the utterances after training. The neural network estimated the amount of stress at a frequency of 25 Hz and outperformed the human baseline.

2006

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Wizard-of-Oz Data Collection for Perception and Interaction in Multi-User Environments
Petra-Maria Strauß | Holger Hoffman | Wolfgang Minker | Heiko Neumann | Günther Palm | Stefan Scherer | Friedhelm Schwenker | Harald Traue | Welf Walter | Ulrich Weidenbacher
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06)

In this paper we present the setup of an extensive Wizard-of-Oz environment used for the data collection and the development of a dialogue system. The envisioned Perception and Interaction Assistant will act as an independent dialogue partner. Passively observing the dialogue between the two human users with respect to a limited domain, the system should take the initiative and get meaningfully involved in the communication process when required by the conversational situation. The data collection described here involves audio and video data. We aim at building a rich multi-media data corpus to be used as a basis for our research which includes, inter alia, speech and gaze direction recognition, dialogue modelling and proactivity of the system. We further aspire to obtain data with emotional content to perfom research on emotion recognition, psychopysiological and usability analysis.