ISCA Archive Interspeech 2023
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2023

Multiple Instance Learning for Inference of Child Attachment From Paralinguistic Aspects of Speech

Areej Buker, Huda Alsofyani, Alessandro Vinciarelli

Attachment is a psychological construct that accounts for the way children perceive their relationship with their caregivers. Depending on the attachment condition, a child can either be secure or insecure. Identifying as many insecure children as possible is important to mitigate the negative consequences of insecure attachment in adult life. For this reason, this article proposes an attachment recognition approach that, compared to other approaches, increases the Recall, the percentage of insecure children identified as such. The approach is based on Multiple Instance Learning, a body of methodologies dealing with data represented as "bags" of feature vectors. This is suitable for speech recordings because these are typically represented as vector sequences. The experiments involved 104 participants of age 5 to 9. The results show that insecure children can be identified with Recall up to 63.3% (accuracy up to 75%), an improvement with respect to most existing models.