Ten recent trends in computational paralinguistics

The field of computational paralinguistics is currently emerging from loosely connected research on speaker states, traits, and vocal behaviour. Starting from a broad perspective on the state-of-the-art in this field, we combine these facts with a bit of 'tea leaf reading' to identify ten currently dominant trends that might also characterise the next decade of research: taking into account more tasks and task interdependencies, modelling paralinguistic information in the continuous domain, agglomerating and evaluating on large amounts of heterogeneous data, exploiting more and more types of features, fusing linguistic and non-linguistic phenomena, devoting more effort to optimisation of the machine learning aspects, standardising the whole processing chain, addressing robustness and security of systems, proceeding to evaluation in real-life conditions, and finally overcoming cross-language and cross-cultural barriers. We expect that following these trends we will see an increase in the 'social competence' of tomorrow's speech and language processing systems.