Title: Inferring Speaker Affect in Spoken Natural Language Communication
Description: The field of spoken language processing is concerned with creating computer programs that can understand human speech and produce human-like speech. Regarding the problem of understanding human speech, there is currently growing interest in moving beyond speech recognition (the task of transcribing the words in an audio stream) and towards machine listening---interpreting the full spectrum of information in an audio stream. One part of machine listening, the problem that this thesis focuses on, is the task of using information in the speech signal to infer a person's emotional or mental state.