Classification of Vocal Bursts for ACII 2022 A-VB-Type Competition using Convolutional Network Networks and Deep Acoustic Embeddings

This report provides a brief description of our proposed solution for the Vocal Burst Type classification task of the ACII 2022 Affective Vocal Bursts (A-VB) Competition. We experimented with two approaches as part of our solution for the task at hand. The first of which is based on convolutional neural networks trained on Mel Spectrograms, and the second is based on average pooling of deep acoustic embeddings from a pretrained wav2vec2 model. Our best performing model achieves an unweighted average recall (UAR) of 0.5190 for the test partition, compared to the chance-level UAR of 0.1250 and a baseline of 0.4172. Thus, an improvement of around 20% over the challenge baseline. The results reported in this document demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed approaches to solve the AV-B Type Classification task.