The INTERSPEECH 2017 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge addresses three different problems for the first time in research competition under well-defined conditions: In the Addressee sub-challenge, it has to be determined whether speech produced by an adult is directed towards another adult or towards a child; in the Cold sub-challenge, speech under cold has to be told apart from 'healthy' speech; and in the Snoring sub-challenge, four different types of snoring have to be classified. In this paper, we describe these sub-challenges, their conditions, and the baseline feature extraction and classifiers, which include data-learnt feature representations by end-to-end learning with convolutional and recurrent neural networks, and bag-of-audio-words for the first time in the challenge series.

baseline systems on the three proposed tasks: state-of-mind recognition, depression assessment with AI, and cross-cultural affect sensing, respectively.

The INTERSPEECH 2018 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge addresses four different problems for the first time in a research competition under well-defined conditions: In the Atypical Affect Sub-Challenge, four basic emotions annotated in the speech of handicapped subjects have to be classified; in the Self-Assessed Affect Sub-Challenge, valence scores given by the speakers themselves are used for a three-class classification problem; in the Crying Sub-Challenge, three types of infant vocalisations have to be told apart; and in the Heart Beats Sub-Challenge, three different types of heart beats have to be determined. We describe the Sub-Challenges, their conditions, and baseline feature extraction and classifiers, which include data-learnt (supervised) feature representations by end-to-end learning, the 'usual' ComParE and BoAW features, and deep unsupervised representation learning using the AUDEEP toolkit for the first time in the challenge series.

The INTERSPEECH 2020 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge addresses three different problems for the first time in a research competition under well-defined conditions: In the Elderly Emotion Sub-Challenge, arousal and valence in the speech of elderly individuals have to be modelled as a 3-class problem; in the Breathing Sub-Challenge, breathing has to be assessed as a regression problem; and in the Mask Sub-Challenge, speech without and with a surgical mask has to be told apart. We describe the Sub-Challenges, baseline feature extraction, and classifiers based on the 'usual' COMPARE and BoAW features as well as deep unsupervised representation learning using the AUDEEP toolkit, and deep feature extraction from pre-trained CNNs using the DEEP SPECTRUM toolkit; in addition, we partially add deep end-to-end sequential modelling, and, for the first time in the challenge, linguistic analysis.

The INTERSPEECH 2019 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge addresses four different problems for the first time in a research competition under well-defined conditions: In the Styrian Dialects Sub-Challenge, three types of Austrian-German dialects have to be classified; in the Continuous Sleepiness Sub-Challenge, the sleepiness of a speaker has to be assessed as regression problem; in the Baby Sound Sub-Challenge, five types of infant sounds have to be classified; and in the Orca Activity Sub-Challenge, orca sounds have to be detected. We describe the Sub-Challenges and baseline feature extraction and classifiers, which include data-learnt (supervised) feature representations by the 'usual' ComParE and BoAW features, and deep unsupervised representation learning using the AUDEEP toolkit.

Natural human-computer interaction and audio-visual human behaviour sensing systems, which would achieve robust performance in-the-wild are more needed than ever as digital devices are increasingly becoming an indispensable part of our life. Accurately annotated real-world data are the crux in devising such systems. However, existing databases usually consider controlled settings, low demographic variability, and a single task. In this paper, we introduce the SEWA database of more than 2000 minutes of audio-visual data of 398 people coming from six cultures, 50% female, and uniformly spanning the age range of 18 to 65 years old. Subjects were recorded in two different contexts: while watching adverts and while discussing adverts in a video chat. The database includes rich annotations of the recordings in terms of facial landmarks, facial action units (FAU), various vocalisations, mirroring, and continuously valued valence, arousal, liking, agreement, and prototypic examples of (dis)liking. This database aims to be an extremely valuable resource for researchers in affective computing and automatic human sensing and is expected to push forward the research in human behaviour analysis, including cultural studies. Along with the database, we provide extensive baseline experiments for automatic FAU detection and automatic valence, arousal and (dis)liking intensity estimation.

Recognition of natural emotion in speech is a challenging task. Different methods have been proposed to tackle this complex task, such as acoustic feature brute-forcing or even endto-end learning. Recently, bag-of-audio-words (BoAW) representations of acoustic low-level descriptors (LLDs) have been employed successfully in the domain of acoustic event classification and other audio recognition tasks. In this approach, feature vectors of acoustic LLDs are quantised according to a learnt codebook of audio words. Then, a histogram of the occurring 'words' is built. Despite their massive potential, BoAW have not been thoroughly studied in emotion recognition. Here, we propose a method using BoAW created only of mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs). Support vector regression is then used to predict emotion continuously in time and value, such as in the dimensions arousal and valence. We compare this approach with the computation of functionals based on the MFCCs and perform extensive evaluations on the RECOLA database, which features spontaneous and natural emotions. Results show that, BoAW representation of MFCCs does not only perform significantly better than functionals, but also outperforms by far most of recently published deep learning approaches, including convolutional and recurrent networks.

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