Using maximum entropy (ME) model to incorporate gesture cues for SU detection

  • Authors:

  • Lei Chen;Mary Harper;Zhongqiang Huang

  • Affiliations:

  • Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN;Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN;Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Multimodal interfaces
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Accurate identification of sentence units (SUs) in spontaneous speech has been found to improve the accuracy of speech recognition, as well as downstream applications such as parsing. In recent multimodal investigations, gestur]al features were utilized, in addition to lexical and prosodic cues from the speech channel, for detecting SUs in conversational interactions using a hidden Markov model (HMM) approach. Although this approach is computationally efficient and provides a convenient way to modularize the knowledge sources, it has two drawbacks for our SU task. First, standard HMM training methods maximize the joint probability of observations and hidden events, as opposed to the posterior probability of a hidden event given observations, a criterion more closely related to SU classification error. A second challenge for integrating gestural features is that their absence sanctions neither SU events nor non-events; it is only the co-timing of gestures with the speech channel that should impact our model. To address these problems, a Maximum Entropy (ME) model is used to combine multimodal cues for SU estimation. Experiments carried out on VACE multi-party meetings confirm that the ME modeling approach provides a solid framework for multimodal integration.