323 research outputs found

    Towards Speech Emotion Recognition "in the wild" using Aggregated Corpora and Deep Multi-Task Learning

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    One of the challenges in Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) "in the wild" is the large mismatch between training and test data (e.g. speakers and tasks). In order to improve the generalisation capabilities of the emotion models, we propose to use Multi-Task Learning (MTL) and use gender and naturalness as auxiliary tasks in deep neural networks. This method was evaluated in within-corpus and various cross-corpus classification experiments that simulate conditions "in the wild". In comparison to Single-Task Learning (STL) based state of the art methods, we found that our MTL method proposed improved performance significantly. Particularly, models using both gender and naturalness achieved more gains than those using either gender or naturalness separately. This benefit was also found in the high-level representations of the feature space, obtained from our method proposed, where discriminative emotional clusters could be observed.Comment: Published in the proceedings of INTERSPEECH, Stockholm, September, 201

    Semi-Supervised Speech Emotion Recognition with Ladder Networks

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    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

    Self Supervised Adversarial Domain Adaptation for Cross-Corpus and Cross-Language Speech Emotion Recognition

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    Despite the recent advancement in speech emotion recognition (SER) within a single corpus setting, the performance of these SER systems degrades significantly for cross-corpus and cross-language scenarios. The key reason is the lack of generalisation in SER systems towards unseen conditions, which causes them to perform poorly in cross-corpus and cross-language settings. Recent studies focus on utilising adversarial methods to learn domain generalised representation for improving cross-corpus and cross-language SER to address this issue. However, many of these methods only focus on cross-corpus SER without addressing the cross-language SER performance degradation due to a larger domain gap between source and target language data. This contribution proposes an adversarial dual discriminator (ADDi) network that uses the three-players adversarial game to learn generalised representations without requiring any target data labels. We also introduce a self-supervised ADDi (sADDi) network that utilises self-supervised pre-training with unlabelled data. We propose synthetic data generation as a pretext task in sADDi, enabling the network to produce emotionally discriminative and domain invariant representations and providing complementary synthetic data to augment the system. The proposed model is rigorously evaluated using five publicly available datasets in three languages and compared with multiple studies on cross-corpus and cross-language SER. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves improved performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods.Comment: Accepted in IEEE Transactions on Affective Computin

    TOWARDS BUILDING GENERALIZABLE SPEECH EMOTION RECOGNITION MODELS

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    Abstract: Detecting the mental state of a person has implications in psychiatry, medicine, psychology and human-computer interaction systems among others. It includes (but is not limited to) a wide variety of problems such as emotion detection, valence-affect-dominance states prediction, mood detection and detection of clinical depression. In this thesis we focus primarily on emotion recognition. Like any recognition system, building an emotion recognition model consists of the following two steps: 1. Extraction of meaningful features that would help in classification 2. Development of an appropriate classifier Speech data being non-invasive and the ease with which it can be collected has made it a popular candidate for feature extraction. However, an ideal system designed should be agnostic to speaker and channel effects. While feature normalization schemes can counter these problems to some extent, we still see a drastic drop in performance when the training and test data-sets are unmatched. In this dissertation we explore some novel ways towards building models that are more robust to speaker and domain differences. Training discriminative classifiers involves learning a conditional distribution p(y_i|x_i), given a set of feature vectors x_i and the corresponding labels y_i; i=1,...N. For a classifier to be generalizable and not overfit to training data, the resulting conditional distribution p(y_i|x_i) is desired to be smoothly varying over the inputs x_i. Adversarial training procedures enforce this smoothness using manifold regularization techniques. Manifold regularization makes the model’s output distribution more robust to local perturbation added to a datapoint x_i. In the first part of the dissertation, we investigate two training procedures: (i) adversarial training where we determine the perturbation direction based on the given labels for the training data and, (ii) virtual adversarial training where we determine the perturbation direction based only on the output distribution of the training data. We demonstrate the efficacy of adversarial training procedures by performing a k-fold cross validation experiment on the Interactive Emotional Dyadic Motion Capture (IEMOCAP) and a cross-corpus performance analysis on three separate corpora. We compare their performances to that of a model utilizing other regularization schemes such as L1/L2 and graph based manifold regularization scheme. Results show improvement over a purely supervised approach, as well as better generalization capability to cross-corpus settings. Our second approach to better discriminate between emotions leverages multi-modal learning and automated speech recognition (ASR) systems toward improving the generalizability of an emotion recognition model that requires only speech as input. Previous studies have shown that emotion recognition models using only acoustic features do not perform satisfactorily in detecting valence level. Text analysis has been shown to be helpful for sentiment classification. We compared classification accuracies obtained from an audio-only model, a text-only model and a multi-modal system leveraging both by performing a cross-validation analysis on IEMOCAP dataset. Confusion matrices show it’s the valence level detection that is being improved by incorporating textual information. In the second stage of experiments, we used three ASR application programming interfaces (APIs) to get the transcriptions. We compare the performances of multi-modal systems using the ASR transcriptions with each other and with that of one using ground truth transcription. This is followed by a cross-corpus study. In the third part of the study we investigate the generalizability of generative of generative adversarial networks (GANs) based models. GANs have gained a lot of attention from machine learning community due to their ability to learn and mimic an input data distribution. GANs consist of a discriminator and a generator working in tandem playing a min-max game to learn a target underlying data distribution; when fed with data-points sampled from a simpler distribution (like uniform or Gaussian distribution). Once trained, they allow synthetic generation of examples sampled from the target distribution. We investigate the applicability of GANs to get lower dimensional representations from the higher dimensional feature vectors pertinent for emotion recognition. We also investigate their ability to generate synthetic higher dimensional feature vectors using points sampled from a lower dimensional prior. Specifically, we investigate two set ups: (i) when the lower dimensional prior from which synthetic feature vectors are generated is pre-defined, (ii) when the distribution of lower dimensional prior is learned from training data. We define the metrics that we used to measure and analyze the performance of these generative models in different train/test conditions. We perform cross validation analysis followed by a cross-corpus study. Finally we make an attempt towards understanding the relation between two different sub-problems encompassed under mental state detection namely depression detection and emotion recognition. We propose approaches that can be investigated to build better depression detection models by leveraging our ability to recognize emotions accurately

    Survey of deep representation learning for speech emotion recognition

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    Traditionally, speech emotion recognition (SER) research has relied on manually handcrafted acoustic features using feature engineering. However, the design of handcrafted features for complex SER tasks requires significant manual eort, which impedes generalisability and slows the pace of innovation. This has motivated the adoption of representation learning techniques that can automatically learn an intermediate representation of the input signal without any manual feature engineering. Representation learning has led to improved SER performance and enabled rapid innovation. Its effectiveness has further increased with advances in deep learning (DL), which has facilitated \textit{deep representation learning} where hierarchical representations are automatically learned in a data-driven manner. This paper presents the first comprehensive survey on the important topic of deep representation learning for SER. We highlight various techniques, related challenges and identify important future areas of research. Our survey bridges the gap in the literature since existing surveys either focus on SER with hand-engineered features or representation learning in the general setting without focusing on SER
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