ISCA Archive Interspeech 2005
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2005

Detecting Politeness and frustration state of a child in a conversational computer game

Serdar Yildirim, Chul Min Lee, Sungbok Lee, Alexandros Potamianos, Shrikanth Narayanan

In this study, we investigate politeness and frustration behavior of children during their spoken interaction with computer characters in a game. We focus on automatically detecting frustrated, polite and neutral attitudes from the child's speech (acoustic and language) communication cues and study their differences as a function of age and gender. The study is based on a Wizard-of-Oz dialog corpus of 103 children playing a voice activated computer game. Statistical analysis revealed that there was a significant gender effect on politeness with girls in this data exhibiting more explicit politeness markers. The analysis also showed that there is a positive correlation between frustration and the number of dialog turns reflecting the fact that longer time spent solving the puzzle of the game led to a more frustrated child. By combining acoustic and language cues for the task of automatic detection of politeness and frustration, we obtain average accuracy of 84.7% and 71.3%, respectively, by using age dependent models and 85% and 72%, respectively, for gender dependent models.