Connectionists: [CfP] Vocal Emotion Workshop & Competition at ICML

[Alice Baird]

 Dear Community,

We are delighted to announce that the first annual ICML Expressive
Vocalization (ExVo) Workshop and Competition will be open for registration
on April 1st 2022. Organized by leading multidisciplinary researchers in
emotion science and AI research and co-sponsored by Hume AI and Mila, in
this first iteration of ExVo, we explore the machine learning problem of
understanding and generating vocal bursts—a wide range of expressive
non-verbal vocalizations such as laughs, sighs, grunts, cries, and screams
(to name but a few).

Participants of the ExVo Challenge will be presented with three tasks that
utilize a newly introduced, large-scale dataset with 60k recordings from
1.7k speakers. The dataset and three tasks draw attention to new
innovations in emotion science and capture 10 dimensions of emotion
reliably perceived in distinct vocal bursts: Awe, Excitement, Amusement,
Awkwardness, Fear, Horror, Distress, Triumph, Sadness and Surprise.

The three tasks include:

The Multi-task High-Dimensional Emotion, Age & Country Task (ExVo
Multi-task). Participants will train models to predict the average
intensity of each of 10 emotions perceived in vocal bursts, as well as the
speaker's age and country, using multitask learning.

The Generative Emotional Vocal Burst Task (ExVo Generate). Participants
will use generative models to produce vocal bursts that are associated with
10 distinct emotions. Each team will submit five machine-generated
vocalizations that separately convey each emotion—“awe,” “fear,” and
more—with maximal intensity and fidelity. The ExVo organization team will
provide an automated method for scoring generated samples, but the final
evaluation will be performed using human survey ratings.

The Few-Shot Emotion Recognition task (ExVo Few-Shot). Participants will
predict 10 emotions associated with each speaker’s vocal bursts using
multi-output regression with two-shot speaker personalization. Participants
will be provided with at least 2 labeled samples per speaker in all splits
(train, validation, test). The speaker IDs and the 2 labeled samples per
speaker in the test set will be withheld until a week before the deadline
for final evaluation of ExVo Few-Shot models.

The ExVo Workshop will also be accepting contributions on other related
topics:

   -

   Detecting and Understanding Vocal Emotional Behavior
   -

   Multi-Task Learning in Affective Computing
   -

   Generating Nonverbal Vocalizations or Speech Prosody
   -

   Personalized Machine Learning for Affective Computing
   -

   Other topics related to Affective Verbal and Nonverbal Vocalization

See the following website for more information, rules and deadlines:
http:// <goog_21825214>www.competitions.hume.ai

Attached you will find a CfP which can be shared with interested
colleagues, and the general deadlines are as follows:


   -

   Challenge start (data release): April 1st
   -

   Baselines and White paper out: April 8th
   -

   Submission for participants and papers: May 27th
   -

   Notification of Acceptance: June 12th
   -

   Camera-Ready, Posters/Slides: June 17th
   -

   Workshop TBD: ~July 22nd/23rd


We look forward to hearing from interested parties! Please get in touch
with any questions!



Best,

ExVo Workshop & Competition organizing team
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