Speech Emotion Recognition Based on Listener Adaptive Models

This paper presents a novel speech emotion recognition scheme that can deal with the individuality of emotion perception. Most conventional methods directly model the majority decision of multiple listener’s perceived emotions. However, emotion perception varies with the listener, which means the conventional methods can mismatch the recognition results to human perception. In order to mitigate this problem, we propose a Listener Adaptive (LA) model that reflects emotion recognition criteria of each listener. One-hot listener codes with several adaptation layers are employed in the LA model. The LA model yields the posterior probabilities of the listener-specific perceived emotions. Majority-voted emotion can be also estimated by averaging, in the LA model, the posterior probabilities for all listeners. Experiments on two emotional speech datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach offers improved listener-wise perceived emotion recognition performance in natural speech.