Speech emotion recognition based on listener-dependent emotion perception models

This paper presents a novel speech emotion recognition scheme that leverages the individuality of emotion perception. Most conventional methods simply poll multiple listeners and directly model the majority decision as the perceived emotion. However, emotion perception varies with the listener, which forces the conventional methods with their single models to create complex mixtures of emotion perception criteria. In order to mitigate this problem, we propose a majority-voted emotion recognition framework that constructs listener-dependent (LD) emotion recognition models. The LD model can estimate not only listener-wise perceived emotion, but also majority decision by averaging the outputs of the multiple LD models. Three LD models, fine-tuning, auxiliary input, and sub-layer weighting, are introduced, all of which are inspired by successful domain-adaptation frameworks in various speech processing tasks. Experiments on two emotional speech datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the conventional emotion recognition frameworks in not only majority-voted but also listener-wise perceived emotion recognition.