Proceedings of the ACII Affective Vocal Bursts Workshop and Competition 2022 (A-VB): Understanding a critically understudied modality of emotional expression

TL;DR

This paper presents the proceedings of the 2022 Affective Vocal Bursts Workshop and Competition, focusing on understanding emotional expression in vocal bursts like laughs and gasps, highlighting new challenges and datasets in affective computing.

Contribution

It introduces a new challenge and dataset for modeling vocal emotional expressions, emphasizing diverse vocalizations and cultural variations in affective computing.

Findings

Introduction of the large-scale Hume-VB dataset

Four emotion-focused sub-challenges for vocal expression analysis

Highlighting innovations in emotion science related to vocalizations

Abstract

This is the Proceedings of the ACII Affective Vocal Bursts Workshop and Competition (A-VB). A-VB was a workshop-based challenge that introduces the problem of understanding emotional expression in vocal bursts -- a wide range of non-verbal vocalizations that includes laughs, grunts, gasps, and much more. With affective states informing both mental and physical wellbeing, the core focus of the A-VB workshop was the broader discussion of current strategies in affective computing for modeling vocal emotional expression. Within this first iteration of the A-VB challenge, the participants were presented with four emotion-focused sub-challenges that utilize the large-scale and `in-the-wild' Hume-VB dataset. The dataset and the four sub-challenges draw attention to new innovations in emotion science as it pertains to vocal expression, addressing low- and high-dimensional theories of emotional expression, cultural variation, and `call types' (laugh, cry, sigh, etc.).