The Computational Paralinguistics Challenge [Social Sciences]

As Friedrich Nietzsche stated more than a century ago, “The most intelligible factor in language is not the word itself, but the tone, strength, modulation, tempo with which a sequence of words is spoken-in brief, the music behind the words, the passions behind the music, the person behind these passions: everything, in other words, that cannot be written” [1]. However, nonlinguistic aspects were broadly conceived as fringe phenomena until the attitude changed at slow pace half a century ago [2]. Paralanguage-literally “alongside” language-is researched more widely only since the term was arguably first mentioned by the linguist Archibald Hill in 1958. Paralinguistics, first named roughly at the same time by George Leonard Trager [3]-can be limited to “vocal factors” according to David Abercrombie and David Crystal roughly a decade later-also all linguists. With the advent of modern computing devices, a new branch of paralinguistics allowed for their automatic processing.