Software That Listens for Lies

[didymus]

NY Times:

Software That Listens for Lies

SHE looks as innocuous as Miss Marple, Agatha Christie’s famous detective. But also like Miss Marple, Julia Hirschberg, a professor of computer science at Columbia University, may spell trouble for a lot of liars.
That’s because Dr. Hirschberg is teaching computers how to spot deception — programming them to parse people’s speech for patterns that gauge whether they are being honest.
For this sort of lie detection, there’s no need to strap anyone into a machine. The person’s speech provides all the cues — loudness, changes in pitch, pauses between words, ums and ahs, nervous laughs and dozens of other tiny signs that can suggest a lie.

Dr. Hirschberg is not the only researcher using algorithms to trawl our utterances for evidence of our inner lives. A small band of linguists, engineers and computer scientists, among others, are busy training computers to recognize hallmarks of what they call emotional speech — talk that reflects deception, anger, friendliness and even flirtation.
Programs that succeed at spotting these submerged emotions may someday have many practical uses: software that suggests when chief executives at public conferences may be straying from the truth; programs at call centers that alert operators to irate customers on the line; or software at computerized matchmaking services that adds descriptives like “friendly” to usual ones like “single” and “female.”
The technology is becoming more accurate as labs share new building blocks, said Dan Jurafsky, a professor at Stanford whose research focuses on the understanding of language by both machines and humans. Recently, Dr. Jurafsky has been studying the language that people use in four-minute speed-dating sessions, analyzing it for qualities like friendliness and flirtatiousness. He is a winner of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship commonly called a “genius” award, and a co-author of the textbook “Speech and Language Processing.”

“The scientific goal is to understand how our emotions are reflected in our speech,” Dr. Jurafsky said. “The engineering goal is to build better systems that understand these emotions.”
The programs that these researchers are developing aren’t likely to be used as evidence in a court of law. After all, even the use of polygraphs is highly contentious. But the new programs are already doing better than people at some kinds of mind-reading.
Algorithms developed by Dr. Hirschberg and colleagues have been able to spot a liar 70 percent of the time in test situations, while people confronted with the same evidence had only 57 percent accuracy, Dr. Hirschberg said. The algorithms are based on an analysis of the ways people spoke in a research project when they lied or told the truth. In interviews, for example, the participants were asked to press one pedal when they were lying about an activity, and another pedal when telling the truth. Afterward, the recordings were analyzed for vocal features that might spell the deception.
For her continuing research, Dr. Hirschberg and two colleagues recently received a grant from the Air Force for nearly $1.5 million to develop algorithms to analyze English speakers and those who speak Arabic and Mandarin Chinese.

Forget the military, your customer bases (if this works) will be employers and spouses.

 

[purplesunshine]

Better lie detection just makes better liars.

And it would probably be useless on ADD/adhd and anyone on the asbergers/autism spectrium as well as those with mucle or seizure disorders, those with eye conditions and speech impediments…etc

 

[Mungling]

They can barely get speech recognition programs to work right let alone as sophisticated as lie detection. And since we only kind of understand the physiological responses associated with lying, I can’t see this being very accurate. Still, an interesting idea.

 

[odile53]

My stupid bluetooth frequently dials a different number than what I tell it to dial. Speech recognition software leaves a lot to be desired, in my opinion, and I wouldn’t rely on it to sift out whether someone is telling a whopper!

 

[gilliam]

In 2006, Drs. Harry Hollien and James D. Hansberger at the University of Florida evaluated voice stress analyzers for the Department of Defense’s Counterintelligence Field Activity agency.

CIFA study, March 17, 2006: The findings generated by this study led to the conclusion that neither the CVSA [Computer Voice Stress Analyzer] nor the LVA were sensitive to the presence of deception or stress.

In 2008, researchers with the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services performed a study, funded by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), of two voice stress analysis programs, including LVA. They questioned more than 300 arrestees about their recent drug use, and evaluated the programs’ findings of truth when compared against urine drug test results.

One of the study authors, Dr. Kelly R. Damphousse, associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and professor of sociology at the University of Oklahoma, wrote this in an article about the study:

Damphousse, March 2008: According to a recent study funded by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), two of the most popular VSA programs in use by police departments across the country are no better than flipping a coin when it comes to detecting deception regarding recent drug use.

A review of the software by two Swedish linguists, Anders Eriksson and Francisco Lacerda — in a 2007 article in the International Journal of Speech Language and the Law — was even more damning in its assessment of LVA.

Eriksson and Lacerda, 2007: Indeed, our review of scientific studies will show that these machines perform at chance level when tested for reliability. Given such results and the absence of scientific support for the underlying principles it is justified to view the use of these machines as charlatanry and we argue that there are serious ethical and security reasons to demand that responsible authorities and institutions should not get involved in such practices.

We e-mailed Eriksson and asked him how much weight people should place on Ward’s conclusions about Cain and his accuser. Here’s part of his response:
Eriksson, Dec. 2: As we show in our paper, the principles upon which the LVA is based have no more to do with emotion or deception detection than throwing a pair of dice. So the people investigating Mr. Cain would have obtained equally “reliable” results by doing precisely that.

usatoday.com/news/politics/story/2011-12-03/fact-check-cain-lie-detector/51613974/1

 

[Myqyl]

My stupid bluetooth frequently dials a different number than what I tell it to dial. Speech recognition software leaves a lot to be desired, in my opinion, and I wouldn’t rely on it to sift out whether someone is telling a whopper!

Maybe it knew you were lying and really wanted to call the other number? Ever think of that?!?

 

[didymus]

Follow-up:** Samsung And HTC Hit By Wiretapping Lawsuit Over Tracking Software **