ISCA Archive Interspeech 2015
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2015

A dynamic model for behavioral analysis of couple interactions using acoustic features

Wei Xia, James Gibson, Bo Xiao, Brian Baucom, Panayiotis G. Georgiou

Observational therapy is an important element of mental health that relies on a detailed assessment of multiple behavioral cues. Behavioral coding for research in the field is unfortunately often at session-level resolution due to the inherent cost of labeling and human subjectivity. Being able to model the interlocutors' behavior at a fine temporal resolution and analyze the effect of such behavioral changes in the gestalt perception can help psychologists better understand the behavioral mechanism. In this paper, we propose a method to model the dynamically evolving behavior of interlocutors during couple interactions. We firstly present a static behavioral model based on the local decisions with global fusion, and investigate the impact of the frame length to provide effective global evaluations. We then propose a two-layer sequential Hidden Markov Model to capture local state transitions. We use the corpus of Couple Therapy interactions as a case study, finding that an interlocutor does not express a single behavior throughout a conversation, and there are temporal correlations between neighboring frames. We show that dynamic models can achieve up to 10% relative improvement, compared to static models. This suggests that the human behavioral interaction is a non-linear process, and the resulting latent-state labels may provide new insights to domain experts.