Employing voice-based emotion recognition function in artificial intelligence (AI) product will improve the user experience. Most of researches that have been done only focus on the speech collected under controlled conditions. The scenarios evaluated in these research were well controlled. The conventional approach may fail when background noise or nonspeech filler exist. In this paper, we propose an ensemble framework combining several aspects of features from audio. The framework incorporates gender and speaker information relying on multi-task learning. Therefore it is able to dig and capture emotional information as much as possible. This framework is evaluated on multimodal emotion challenge (MEC) 2017 corpus which is close to real world. The proposed framework outperformed the best baseline system by 29.5 (relative improvement).
Deep learning techniques were emerging as new classifier in speech related machine learning area @cite_9 . The deep learning techniques, such as (DNN), (CNN) and (RNN) is able to model the feature in a high dimensional manifold space. DNN as static classifier and RNN as dynamic classifier showed their advantage in emotion recognition task compared with conventional approaches @cite_18 . Especially, @cite_18 used attention based weighted pooling to extract acoustic representation. It showed advantage over the conventional hand crafted features. Multi-task learning recently raised as a technique helping train better model for main task @cite_1 @cite_6 . However these work used valence and arousal as auxiliary tasks which may be difficult to get.
@cite_1 @cite_9 @cite_18 @cite_6
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Dimensional models have been proposed in psychology studies to represent complex human emotional expressions. Activation and valence are two common dimensions in such models. They can be used to describe certain emotions. For example, anger is one type of emotion with a low valence and high activation value; neutral has both a medium level valence and activation value. In this work, we propose to apply multi-task learning to leverage activation and valence information for acoustic emotion recognition based on the deep belief network (DBN) framework. We treat the categorical emotion recognition task as the major task. For the secondary task, we leverage activation and valence labels in two different ways, category level based classification and continuous level based regression. The combination of the loss functions from the major and secondary tasks is used as the objective function in the multi-task learning framework. After iterative optimization, the values from the last hidden layer in the DBN are used as new features and fed into a support vector machine classifier for emotion recognition. Our experimental results on the Interactive Emotional Dyadic Motion Capture and Sustained Emotionally Colored Machine-Human Interaction Using Nonverbal Expression databases show significant improvements on unweighted accuracy, illustrating the benefit of utilizing additional information in a multi-task learning setup for emotion recognition. We show how to use "complementary priors" to eliminate the explaining-away effects that make inference difficult in densely connected belief nets that have many hidden layers. Using complementary priors, we derive a fast, greedy algorithm that can learn deep, directed belief networks one layer at a time, provided the top two layers form an undirected associative memory. The fast, greedy algorithm is used to initialize a slower learning procedure that fine-tunes the weights using a contrastive version of the wake-sleep algorithm. After fine-tuning, a network with three hidden layers forms a very good generative model of the joint distribution of handwritten digit images and their labels. This generative model gives better digit classification than the best discriminative learning algorithms. The low-dimensional manifolds on which the digits lie are modeled by long ravines in the free-energy landscape of the top-level associative memory, and it is easy to explore these ravines by using the directed connections to display what the associative memory has in mind. Automatic emotion recognition from speech is a challenging task which relies heavily on the effectiveness of the speech features used for classification. In this work, we study the use of deep learning to automatically discover emotionally relevant features from speech. It is shown that using a deep recurrent neural network, we can learn both the short-time frame-level acoustic features that are emotionally relevant, as well as an appropriate temporal aggregation of those features into a compact utterance-level representation. Moreover, we propose a novel strategy for feature pooling over time which uses local attention in order to focus on specific regions of a speech signal that are more emotionally salient. The proposed solution is evaluated on the IEMOCAP corpus, and is shown to provide more accurate predictions compared to existing emotion recognition algorithms.