Gérard Chollet

Yannis Tevissen, Jérôme Boudy, Gérard Chollet et al.

Speaker diarization, or the task of finding "who spoke and when", is now used in almost every speech processing application. Nevertheless, its fairness has not yet been evaluated because there was no protocol to study its biases one by one. In this paper we propose a protocol and a scoring method designed to evaluate speaker diarization fairness. This protocol is applied on a large dataset of spoken utterances and report the performances of speaker diarization depending on the gender, the age, the accent of the speaker and the length of the spoken sentence. Some biases induced by the gender, or the accent of the speaker were identified when we applied a state-of-the-art speaker diarization method.

Luisa Brinkschulte, Natascha Mariacher, Stephan Schlögl et al.

This paper outlines the EMPATHIC Research & Innovation project, which aims to research, innovate, explore and validate new interaction paradigms and plat-forms for future generations of Personalized Virtual Coaches to assist elderly people living independently at and around their home. Innovative multimodal face analytics, adaptive spoken dialogue systems, and natural language inter-faces are part of what the project investigates and innovates, aiming to help dependent aging persons and their carers. It will uses remote, non-intrusive technologies to extract physiological markers of emotional states and adapt respective coach responses. In doing so, it aims to develop causal models for emotionally believable coach-user interactions, which shall engage elders and thus keep off loneliness, sustain health, enhance quality of life, and simplify access to future telecare services. Through measurable end-user validations performed in Spain, Norway and France (and complementary user evaluations in Italy), the proposed methods and solutions will have to demonstrate useful-ness, reliability, flexibility and robustness.