24,355 research outputs found
Semi-Supervised Speech Emotion Recognition with Ladder Networks
Speech emotion recognition (SER) systems find applications in various fields
such as healthcare, education, and security and defense. A major drawback of
these systems is their lack of generalization across different conditions. This
problem can be solved by training models on large amounts of labeled data from
the target domain, which is expensive and time-consuming. Another approach is
to increase the generalization of the models. An effective way to achieve this
goal is by regularizing the models through multitask learning (MTL), where
auxiliary tasks are learned along with the primary task. These methods often
require the use of labeled data which is computationally expensive to collect
for emotion recognition (gender, speaker identity, age or other emotional
descriptors). This study proposes the use of ladder networks for emotion
recognition, which utilizes an unsupervised auxiliary task. The primary task is
a regression problem to predict emotional attributes. The auxiliary task is the
reconstruction of intermediate feature representations using a denoising
autoencoder. This auxiliary task does not require labels so it is possible to
train the framework in a semi-supervised fashion with abundant unlabeled data
from the target domain. This study shows that the proposed approach creates a
powerful framework for SER, achieving superior performance than fully
supervised single-task learning (STL) and MTL baselines. The approach is
implemented with several acoustic features, showing that ladder networks
generalize significantly better in cross-corpus settings. Compared to the STL
baselines, the proposed approach achieves relative gains in concordance
correlation coefficient (CCC) between 3.0% and 3.5% for within corpus
evaluations, and between 16.1% and 74.1% for cross corpus evaluations,
highlighting the power of the architecture
The Many Moods of Emotion
This paper presents a novel approach to the facial expression generation
problem. Building upon the assumption of the psychological community that
emotion is intrinsically continuous, we first design our own continuous emotion
representation with a 3-dimensional latent space issued from a neural network
trained on discrete emotion classification. The so-obtained representation can
be used to annotate large in the wild datasets and later used to trained a
Generative Adversarial Network. We first show that our model is able to map
back to discrete emotion classes with a objectively and subjectively better
quality of the images than usual discrete approaches. But also that we are able
to pave the larger space of possible facial expressions, generating the many
moods of emotion. Moreover, two axis in this space may be found to generate
similar expression changes as in traditional continuous representations such as
arousal-valence. Finally we show from visual interpretation, that the third
remaining dimension is highly related to the well-known dominance dimension
from psychology
Generating Labels for Regression of Subjective Constructs using Triplet Embeddings
Human annotations serve an important role in computational models where the
target constructs under study are hidden, such as dimensions of affect. This is
especially relevant in machine learning, where subjective labels derived from
related observable signals (e.g., audio, video, text) are needed to support
model training and testing. Current research trends focus on correcting
artifacts and biases introduced by annotators during the annotation process
while fusing them into a single annotation. In this work, we propose a novel
annotation approach using triplet embeddings. By lifting the absolute
annotation process to relative annotations where the annotator compares
individual target constructs in triplets, we leverage the accuracy of
comparisons over absolute ratings by human annotators. We then build a
1-dimensional embedding in Euclidean space that is indexed in time and serves
as a label for regression. In this setting, the annotation fusion occurs
naturally as a union of sets of sampled triplet comparisons among different
annotators. We show that by using our proposed sampling method to find an
embedding, we are able to accurately represent synthetic hidden constructs in
time under noisy sampling conditions. We further validate this approach using
human annotations collected from Mechanical Turk and show that we can recover
the underlying structure of the hidden construct up to bias and scaling
factors.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, accepted journal pape
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