# openXBOW - Introducing the Passau Open-Source Crossmodal Bag-of-Words Toolkit

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.06778 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06778/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 22 May 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [The INTERSPEECH 2021 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge: COVID-19 Cough, COVID-19 Speech, Escalation & Primates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.13468/) (2021)
- [SERAB: A multi-lingual benchmark for speech emotion recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03414/) (2021)
- [The ICML 2022 Expressive Vocalizations Workshop and Competition: Recognizing, Generating, and Personalizing Vocal Bursts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01780/) (2022)
- [On the Impact of Word Error Rate on Acoustic-Linguistic Speech Emotion Recognition: An Update for the Deep Learning Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10121/) (2021)
- [The ACM Multimedia 2022 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge: Vocalisations, Stuttering, Activity, & Mosquitoes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06799/) (2022)
- [Dual-Constrained Dynamical Neural ODEs for Ambiguity-aware Continuous Emotion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21344/) (2024)
- [Fusing Convolutional Neural Network and Geometric Constraint for Image-based Indoor Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01408/) (2022)
- [A Summary of the ComParE COVID-19 Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08981/) (2022)
- [Deciphering GunType Hierarchy through Acoustic Analysis of Gunshot Recordings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20609/) (2025)
- [Emotions as Ambiguity-aware Ordinal Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19193/) (2025)
- [Visualizations of Complex Sequences of Family-Infant Vocalizations Using Bag-of-Audio-Words Approach Based on Wav2vec 2.0 Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15183/) (2022)
- [Identification of Cognitive Decline from Spoken Language through Feature Selection and the Bag of Acoustic Words Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01824/) (2024)
- [Dementia classification from spontaneous speech using wrapper-based feature selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03484/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce openXBOW, an open-source toolkit for the generation of bag-of-words (BoW) representations from multimodal input. In the BoW principle, word histograms were first used as features in document classification, but the idea was and can easily be adapted to, e.g., acoustic or visual low-level descriptors, introducing a prior step of vector quantisation. The openXBOW toolkit supports arbitrary numeric input features and text input and concatenates computed subbags to a final bag. It provides a variety of extensions and options. To our knowledge, openXBOW is the first publicly available toolkit for the generation of crossmodal bags-of-words. The capabilities of the tool are exemplified in two sample scenarios: time-continuous speech-based emotion recognition and sentiment analysis in tweets where improved results over other feature representation forms were observed.