System for Interspeech 2010 Paralinguistic Challenge

Abstract This paper describes Brno University of Technology (BUT) system for the Interspeech 2010 Paralinguistic Challenge. Our submitted systems for the Age-and Gender-Sub-Challenges employ fusions of several sub-systems. We make use of our own acoustic frame-based feature sets, as well as the provided utterance-based acoustic, prosodic and voice quality features. Modeling is based on Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) and Support Vector Machines (SVM), followed by linear Gaussian backends and logistic regression-based fusion. For a single subsystem, we obtain improvement of about 2% absolute, for both tasks, on the development-set. Our final fusion results in nearly 9% absolute improvement for the Age task and about 4.5% for the Gender task on the development set. On the final test set we obtain 3.5% and 2% absolute improvement, respectively