Ethical Awareness in Paralinguistics: A Taxonomy of Applications

Since the end of the last century, the automatic processing of paralinguistics has been investigated widely and put into practice in many applications, on wearables, smartphones, and computers. In this contribution, we address ethical awareness for paralinguistic applications, by establishing taxonomies for data representations, system designs for and a typology of applications, and users/test sets and subject areas. These are related to an “ethical grid” consisting of the most relevant ethical cornerstones, based on principalism. The characteristics of and the interdependencies between these taxonomies are described and exemplified. This makes it possible to assess more or less critical “ethical constellations.” To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt of its kind.