Nonparallel Emotional Speech Conversion

We propose a nonparallel data-driven emotional speech conversion method. It enables the transfer of emotion-related characteristics of a speech signal while preserving the speaker's identity and linguistic content. Most existing approaches require parallel data and time alignment, which is not available in most real applications. We achieve nonparallel training based on an unsupervised style transfer technique, which learns a translation model between two distributions instead of a deterministic one-to-one mapping between paired examples. The conversion model consists of an encoder and a decoder for each emotion domain. We assume that the speech signal can be decomposed into an emotion-invariant content code and an emotion-related style code in latent space. Emotion conversion is performed by extracting and recombining the content code of the source speech and the style code of the target emotion. We tested our method on a nonparallel corpora with four emotions. Both subjective and objective evaluations show the effectiveness of our approach.Comment: Published in INTERSPEECH 2019, 5 pages, 6 figures. Simulation available at http://www.jian-gao.org/emoga

Semi-supervised Multi-modal Emotion Recognition with Cross-Modal Distribution Matching

Automatic emotion recognition is an active research topic with wide range of applications. Due to the high manual annotation cost and inevitable label ambiguity, the development of emotion recognition dataset is limited in both scale and quality. Therefore, one of the key challenges is how to build effective models with limited data resource. Previous works have explored different approaches to tackle this challenge including data enhancement, transfer learning, and semi-supervised learning etc. However, the weakness of these existing approaches includes such as training instability, large performance loss during transfer, or marginal improvement. In this work, we propose a novel semi-supervised multi-modal emotion recognition model based on cross-modality distribution matching, which leverages abundant unlabeled data to enhance the model training under the assumption that the inner emotional status is consistent at the utterance level across modalities. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the proposed model on two benchmark datasets, IEMOCAP and MELD. The experiment results prove that the proposed semi-supervised learning model can effectively utilize unlabeled data and combine multi-modalities to boost the emotion recognition performance, which outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches under the same condition. The proposed model also achieves competitive capacity compared with existing approaches which take advantage of additional auxiliary information such as speaker and interaction context.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, to be published on ACM Multimedia 202

Learning deep physiological models of affect

Feature extraction and feature selection are crucial phases in the process of affective modeling. Both, however, incorporate substantial limitations that hinder the development of reliable and accurate models of affect. For the purpose of modeling affect manifested through physiology, this paper builds on recent advances in machine learning with deep learning (DL) approaches. The efficiency of DL algorithms that train artificial neural network models is tested and compared against standard feature extraction and selection approaches followed in the literature. Results on a game data corpus — containing players’ physiological signals (i.e. skin conductance and blood volume pulse) and subjective self-reports of affect — reveal that DL outperforms manual ad-hoc feature extraction as it yields significantly more accurate affective models. Moreover, it appears that DL meets and even outperforms affective models that are boosted by automatic feature selection, for several of the scenarios examined. As the DL method is generic and applicable to any affective modeling task, the key findings of the paper suggest that ad-hoc feature extraction and selection — to a lesser degree — could be bypassed.The authors would like to thank Tobias Mahlmann for his work on the development and administration of the cluster used to run the experiments. Special thanks for proofreading goes to Yana Knight. Thanks also go to the Theano development team, to all participants in our experiments, and to Ubisoft, NSERC and Canada Research Chairs for funding. This work is funded, in part, by the ILearnRW (project no: 318803) and the C2Learn (project no. 318480) FP7 ICT EU projects.peer-reviewe