We present in this paper a contribution to the INTERSPEECH 2012 Speaker Trait Challenge. We participated in the Personality Sub-Challenge, where the main characteristics of speakers according to the five OCEAN dimensions had to be determined based on short audio recordings solely. We considered the task as a general optimization problem and applied a parallelized version of a modified SFFS algorithm, wrapped around a SVM classifier, along with parameter tuning. Our system has yielded higher than baseline scores on all five dimensions, adding more than 20 percentage points to the recognition score of the Openness dimension.

Index Terms: personality detection, feature selection