Thesis Defense - Tuğçe Melike Koçak (MSEE)

Tuğçe Melike Koçak- M. Sc. Electrical and Electronics Engineering

Assoc. Prof. Cenk Demiroğlu – Advisor

Date: 15.01.2021

Time: 15:00

Automatic Detection of Attachment Style in Married Couples Through Conversation Analysis

Thesis Committee:

Assoc. Prof. Demiroğlu, Özyeğin University

Assoc. Prof. Nilüfer Kafesçioğlu, Özyeğin University

Prof. Ümit Güz, Işık University

Abstract:

In this thesis, we present novel aspects of behavioral signal processing in couple interaction. 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 behavior prediction. Here, we focused on the prediction of attachment style using interactions of recently married (1-15 months) couples. In addition to the more traditional acoustic features such as mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) and pitch, we used i-vectors which are the features used in the state-of-the-art speaker verification systems. Experimental results show that i-vectors are indeed complementary to the other spectral and prosodic features and they boost the performance when used together. Sentiment features that were extracted from text, however, did not improve the performance. Similar results are obtained with score and feature fusion algorithms. However, we have found that score fusion's predictions were more consistent when couples have known each other for a longer period of time and that the participants' attachment styles did not change over the 2.5 years.

Bio:

Tuğçe Melike Koçak received her B.Sc. degree in Electrical & Electronics Engineering Department from Ozyegin University in 2018. She started her M. Sc. at Ozyegin University in 2018. She has been doing research under the supervision of Asc. Prof. Cenk Demiroğlu. Her research interests include behavioral signal processing, machine learning. She is currently working at Turkcell in the Artificial Intelligence department.