Personality trait perception from speech signals using multiresolution analysis and convolutional neural networks

This study presents an approach to personality trait (PT) perception from speech signals using wavelet-based multiresolution analysis and convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In this study, first, wavelet transform is employed to decompose the speech signals into the signals at different levels of resolution. Then, the acoustic features of the speech signals at each resolution are extracted. Given the acoustic features, the CNN is adopted to generate the profiles of the Big Five Inventory-10 (BFI- 10), which provide a quantitative measure for expressing the degree of the presence or absence of a set of 10 basic BFI items. The BFI-10 profiles are further fed into five artificial neural networks (ANN), each for one of the five personality dimensions: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism for PT perception. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, experiments were conducted over the SSPNet Speaker Personality Corpus (SPC), including 640 clips randomly extracted from the French news bulletins in the INTERSPEECH 2012 speaker trait sub-challenge. From the experimental results, an average PT perception accuracy of 71.97% was obtained, outperforming the ANN-based method and the Baseline method in the INTERSPEECH 2012 speaker trait sub-challenge.