Batliner, AntonSchuller, BjornSchaeffler, SonjaSteidl, Stefan2018-06-292018-06-292008Batliner, A., Schuller, B., Schaeffler, S. and Steidl, S. (2008) ‘Mothers, adults, children, pets — towards the acoustics of intimacy’, in 2008 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, pp. 4497–4500. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP.2008.4518655.http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP.2008.4518655https://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/736In this paper, we investigate acoustic features which differentiate the two speech registers neutral and intimate within different constellations of speakers and addressees. Three different types of speakers are considered: mothers addressing their own children or an unknown adult, women with no children addressing an imaginary child or an imaginary adult, and children addressing a pet robot using both intimate and neutral speech. We use a large, systematically generated feature vector, upsampling, and SVM and RF for learning. Results are reported for extensive test-runs facing speaker-independency and using PCA-SFFS vs. SVM-SFFS for feature ranking. Classification performance and most relevant feature types are discussed in detail. 2008 IEEE.4497-4500Affective speechEmotionFeature selectionIntimacyarticlehttp://doi:10.1109/ICASSP.2008.4518655