Does my speech rock? Automatic assessment of public speaking skills

In this paper, we introduce results for the task of Automatic Public Speech Assessment (APSA). Given the comparably sparse work carried out on this task up to this point, a novel database was required for training and evaluation of machine learning models. As a basis, the freely available oral presentations of the ICASSP conference in 2011 were selected due to their transcription including non-verbal vocalisations. The data was specifically labelled in terms of the perceived oratory ability of the speakers by five raters according to a 5-point Public Speaking Skill Rating Likert scale. We investigate the feasibility of speaker-independent APSA using different standardised acoustic feature sets computed per fixed chunk of an oral presentation in a series of ternary classification and continuous regression experiments. Further, we compare the relevance of different feature groups related to fluency (speech/hesitation rate), prosody, voice quality and a variety of spectral features. Our results demonstrate that oratory speaking skills can be reliably assessed using suprasegmental audio features, with prosodic ones being particularly suited.