Interpretabilty of Speech Emotion Recognition modelled using Self-Supervised Speech and Text Pre-Trained Embeddings

Speech emotion recognition (SER) is useful in many applications and is approached using signal processing techniques in the past and deep learning techniques recently. Human emotions are complex in nature and can vary widely within an utterance. The SER accuracy has improved using various multimodal techniques but there is still some gap in understanding the model behaviour and expressing these complex emotions in a human interpretable form. In this work, we propose and define interpretability measures represented as a Human Level Indicator Matrix for an utterance and showcase it’s effective-ness in both qualitative and quantitative terms. A word level interpretability is presented using an attention based sequence modelling of self-supervised speech and text pre-trained embeddings. Prosody features are also combined with the proposed model to see the efficacy at the word and utterance level. We provide insights into sub-utterance level emotion predictions for complex utterances where the emotion classes change within the utterance. We evaluate the model and provide the interpretations on the publicly available IEMOCAP dataset.