Automatic detection of attachment style in married couples through conversation analysis

Abstract

Analysis of couple interactions using speech processing techniques is an increasingly active multi-disciplinary field that poses challenges such as automatic relationship quality assessment and behavioral coding. Here, we focused on the prediction of individuals’ attachment style using interactions of recently married (1–15 months) couples. For low-level acoustic feature extraction, in addition to the frame-based acoustic features such as mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) and pitch, we used the turn-based i-vector features that are the commonly used in speaker verification systems. Sentiments, positive and negative, of the dialog turns were also automatically generated from transcribed text and used as features. Feature and score fusion algorithms were used for low-level acoustic features and text features. Even though score and feature fusion algorithms performed similar, predictions with score fusion were more consistent when couples have known each other for a longer period of time.