1 research outputs found
Learning Representations of Emotional Speech with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks
Automatically assessing emotional valence in human speech has historically
been a difficult task for machine learning algorithms. The subtle changes in
the voice of the speaker that are indicative of positive or negative emotional
states are often "overshadowed" by voice characteristics relating to emotional
intensity or emotional activation. In this work we explore a representation
learning approach that automatically derives discriminative representations of
emotional speech. In particular, we investigate two machine learning strategies
to improve classifier performance: (1) utilization of unlabeled data using a
deep convolutional generative adversarial network (DCGAN), and (2) multitask
learning. Within our extensive experiments we leverage a multitask annotated
emotional corpus as well as a large unlabeled meeting corpus (around 100
hours). Our speaker-independent classification experiments show that in
particular the use of unlabeled data in our investigations improves performance
of the classifiers and both fully supervised baseline approaches are
outperformed considerably. We improve the classification of emotional valence
on a discrete 5-point scale to 43.88% and on a 3-point scale to 49.80%, which
is competitive to state-of-the-art performance