Emotion recognition is a challenging task due to limited availability of in-the-wild labeled datasets. Self-supervised learning has shown improvements on tasks with limited labeled datasets in domains like speech and natural language. Models such as BERT learn to incorporate context in word embeddings, which translates to improved performance in downstream tasks like question answering. In this work, we extend self-supervised training to multi-modal applications. We learn multi-modal representations using a transformer trained on the masked language modeling task with audio, visual and text features. This model is fine-tuned on the downstream task of emotion recognition. Our results on the CMU-MOSEI dataset show that this pre-training technique can improve the emotion recognition performance by up to 3% compared to the baseline.
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Nankai University（南开大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Humans are emotional creatures. Multiple modalities are often involved when we express emotions, whether we do so explicitly (e.g., facial expression, speech) or implicitly (e.g., text, image). Enabling machines to have emotional intelligence, i.e., recognizing, interpreting, processing, and simulating emotions, is becoming increasingly important. In this tutorial, we discuss several key aspects of multi-modal emotion recognition (MER). We begin with a brief introduction on widely used emotion representation models and affective modalities. We then summarize existing emotion annotation strateg…
We present an electrocardiogram (ECG) -based emotion recognition system using self-supervised learning. Our proposed architecture consists of two main networks, a signal transformation recognition network and an emotion recognition network. First, unlabelled data are used to successfully train the former network to detect specific pre-determined signal transformations in the self-supervised learning step. Next, the weights of the convolutional layers of this network are transferred to the emotion recognition network, and two dense layers are trained in order to classify arousal and valence sco…
In order to exploit representations of time-series signals, such as physiological signals, it is essential that these representations capture relevant information from the whole signal. In this work, we propose to use a Transformer-based model to process electrocardiograms (ECG) for emotion recognition. Attention mechanisms of the Transformer can be used to build contextualized representations for a signal, giving more importance to relevant parts. These representations may then be processed with a fully-connected network to predict emotions. To overcome the relatively small size of datasets w…
EEG signals have been reported to be informative and reliable for emotion recognition in recent years. However, the inter-subject variability of emotion-related EEG signals still poses a great challenge for the practical applications of EEG-based emotion recognition. Inspired by recent neuroscience studies on inter-subject correlation, we proposed a Contrastive Learning method for Inter-Subject Alignment (CLISA) to tackle the cross-subject emotion recognition problem. Contrastive learning was employed to minimize the inter-subject differences by maximizing the similarity in EEG signal represen…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
Emotion recognition from text is a challenging task due to diverse emotion taxonomies, lack of reliable labeled data in different domains, and highly subjective annotation standards. Few-shot and zero-shot techniques can generalize across unseen emotions by projecting the documents and emotion labels onto a shared embedding space. In this work, we explore the task of few-shot emotion recognition by transferring the knowledge gained from supervision on the GoEmotions Reddit dataset to the SemEval tweets corpus, using different emotion representation methods. The results show that knowledge tran…
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT-K)（印度理工学院坎普尔分校（IIT-K））
Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) is an important and active research area. Recent work has shown the benefits of using multiple modalities (e.g., text, audio, and video) for the ERC task. In a conversation, participants tend to maintain a particular emotional state unless some stimuli evokes a change. There is a continuous ebb and flow of emotions in a conversation. Inspired by this observation, we propose a multimodal ERC model and augment it with an emotion-shift component that improves performance. The proposed emotion-shift component is modular and can be added to any existing mu…
Center for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAiRE)（人工智能研究中心（CAiRE））；Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering（电子与计算机工程系）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Despite the recent achievements made in the multi-modal emotion recognition task, two problems still exist and have not been well investigated: 1) the relationship between different emotion categories are not utilized, which leads to sub-optimal performance; and 2) current models fail to cope well with low-resource emotions, especially for unseen emotions. In this paper, we propose a modality-transferable model with emotion embeddings to tackle the aforementioned issues. We use pre-trained word embeddings to represent emotion categories for textual data. Then, two mapping functions are learned…
We propose a method for emotion recognition through emotiondependent speech recognition using Wav2vec 2.0. Our method achieved a significant improvement over most previously reported results on IEMOCAP, a benchmark emotion dataset. Different types of phonetic units are employed and compared in terms of accuracy and robustness of emotion recognition within and across datasets and languages. Models of phonemes, broad phonetic classes, and syllables all significantly outperform the utterance model, demonstrating that phonetic units are helpful and should be incorporated in speech emotion recognit…
CFN-ESA: A Cross-Modal Fusion Network with Emotion-Shift Awareness for Dialogue Emotion Recognition
School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST)（华中科技大学人工智能与自动化学院）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, HUST（华中科技大学人工智能研究院）；Hubei Key Laboratory of Brain-inspired Intelligent Systems, HUST（华中科技大学湖北省脑启发智能系统重点实验室）；Key Laboratory of Image Processing and Intelligent Control (HUST), Ministry of Education（华中科技大学图像信息处理与智能控制教育部重点实验室）
Couples generally manage chronic diseases together and the management takes an emotional toll on both patients and their romantic partners. Consequently, recognizing the emotions of each partner in daily life could provide an insight into their emotional well-being in chronic disease management. The emotions of partners are currently inferred in the lab and daily life using self-reports which are not practical for continuous emotion assessment or observer reports which are manual, time-intensive, and costly. Currently, there exists no comprehensive overview of works on emotion recognition amon…
Automatic depression detection has attracted increasing amount of attention but remains a challenging task. Psychological research suggests that depressive mood is closely related with emotion expression and perception, which motivates the investigation of whether knowledge of emotion recognition can be transferred for depression detection. This paper uses pretrained features extracted from the emotion recognition model for depression detection, further fuses emotion modality with audio and text to form multimodal depression detection. The proposed emotion transfer improves depression detectio…
Adversarial Representation with Intra-Modal and Inter-Modal Graph Contrastive Learning for Multimodal Emotion Recognition
School of computer and Information Engineering, Central South University of Forestry and Technology（中南林业科技大学计算机与信息工程学院）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；State University of New York（纽约州立大学）
UniMEEC: Towards Unified Multimodal Emotion Recognition and Emotion Cause
Peking University（北京大学）；King Abdullah University of Science and Technology（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）；Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）
The long-standing goal of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been to create human-like conversational systems. Such systems should have the ability to develop an emotional connection with the users, hence emotion recognition in dialogues is an important task. Emotion detection in dialogues is a challenging task because humans usually convey multiple emotions with varying degrees of intensities in a single utterance. Moreover, emotion in an utterance of a dialogue may be dependent on previous utterances making the task more complex. Emotion recognition has always been in great demand. However, mo…
Brazilian Network Information Center (NIC.br)（巴西网络信息中心 (NIC.br)）；Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP)（圣保罗天主教大学 (PUC-SP)）
This paper investigates how Natural Language Understanding (NLU) could be applied in Emotion Recognition, a specific task in affective computing. We finetuned different transformers language models (BERT, DistilBERT, RoBERTa, XLNet, and ELECTRA) using a fine-grained emotion dataset and evaluating them in terms of performance (f1-score) and time to complete.
Acoustic emotion recognition aims to categorize the affective state of the speaker and is still a difficult task for machine learning models. The difficulties come from the scarcity of training data, general subjectivity in emotion perception resulting in low annotator agreement, and the uncertainty about which features are the most relevant and robust ones for classification. In this paper, we will tackle the latter problem. Inspired by the recent success of transfer learning methods we propose a set of architectures which utilize neural representations inferred by training on large speech da…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Instituto Politécnico Nacional（墨西哥国立理工学院）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）
Emotion recognition in conversations is a challenging task that has recently gained popularity due to its potential applications. Until now, however, a large-scale multimodal multi-party emotional conversational database containing more than two speakers per dialogue was missing. Thus, we propose the Multimodal EmotionLines Dataset (MELD), an extension and enhancement of EmotionLines. MELD contains about 13,000 utterances from 1,433 dialogues from the TV-series Friends. Each utterance is annotated with emotion and sentiment labels, and encompasses audio, visual and textual modalities. We propo…
We present EmoBERTa: Speaker-Aware Emotion Recognition in Conversation with RoBERTa, a simple yet expressive scheme of solving the ERC (emotion recognition in conversation) task. By simply prepending speaker names to utterances and inserting separation tokens between the utterances in a dialogue, EmoBERTa can learn intra- and inter- speaker states and context to predict the emotion of a current speaker, in an end-to-end manner. Our experiments show that we reach a new state of the art on the two popular ERC datasets using a basic and straight-forward approach. We've open sourced our code and m…
Central South University（中南大学）；Prevision Technology Limited（预视科技有限公司）；Hunan University（湖南大学）
For the task of conversation emotion recognition, recent works focus on speaker relationship modeling but ignore the role of utterance's emotional tendency.In this paper, we propose a new expression paradigm of sentence-level emotion orientation vector to model the potential correlation of emotions between sentence vectors. Based on it, we design an emotion recognition model, which extracts the sentence-level emotion orientation vectors from the language model and jointly learns from the dialogue sentiment analysis model and extracted sentence-level emotion orientation vectors to identify the …
Sentiment Analysis and Emotion Detection in conversation is key in several real-world applications, with an increase in modalities available aiding a better understanding of the underlying emotions. Multi-modal Emotion Detection and Sentiment Analysis can be particularly useful, as applications will be able to use specific subsets of available modalities, as per the available data. Current systems dealing with Multi-modal functionality fail to leverage and capture - the context of the conversation through all modalities, the dependency between the listener(s) and speaker emotional states, and …
Current approaches to speech emotion recognition focus on speech features that can capture the emotional content of a speech signal. Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) are one of the most commonly used representations for audio speech recognition and classification. This paper proposes Gammatone Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (GFCCs) as a potentially better representation of speech signals for emotion recognition. The effectiveness of MFCC and GFCC representations are compared and evaluated over emotion and intensity classification tasks with fully connected and recurrent neural netw…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Agency for Science, Technology and Research（新加坡科技研究局）
Modern emotion recognition systems are trained to recognize only a small set of emotions, and hence fail to capture the broad spectrum of emotions people experience and express in daily life. In order to engage in more empathetic interactions, future AI has to perform \textit{fine-grained} emotion recognition, distinguishing between many more varied emotions. Here, we focus on improving fine-grained emotion recognition by introducing external knowledge into a pre-trained self-attention model. We propose Knowledge-Embedded Attention (KEA) to use knowledge from emotion lexicons to augment the co…
We propose a novel multi-task pre-training method for Speech Emotion Recognition (SER). We pre-train SER model simultaneously on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and sentiment classification tasks to make the acoustic ASR model more ``emotion aware''. We generate targets for the sentiment classification using text-to-sentiment model trained on publicly available data. Finally, we fine-tune the acoustic ASR on emotion annotated speech data. We evaluated the proposed approach on the MSP-Podcast dataset, where we achieved the best reported concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) of 0.41 for v…
Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur（印度理工学院坎普尔分校）
We investigate the effect and usefulness of spontaneity (i.e. whether a given speech is spontaneous or not) in speech in the context of emotion recognition. We hypothesize that emotional content in speech is interrelated with its spontaneity, and use spontaneity classification as an auxiliary task to the problem of emotion recognition. We propose two supervised learning settings that utilize spontaneity to improve speech emotion recognition: a hierarchical model that performs spontaneity detection before performing emotion recognition, and a multitask learning model that jointly learns to reco…
Information Technology University (ITU)-Punjab（旁遮普信息技术大学）；COMSATS University Islamabad (CUI)（伊斯兰堡COMSATS大学）
Cross-lingual speech emotion recognition is an important task for practical applications. The performance of automatic speech emotion recognition systems degrades in cross-corpus scenarios, particularly in scenarios involving multiple languages or a previously unseen language such as Urdu for which limited or no data is available. In this study, we investigate the problem of cross-lingual emotion recognition for Urdu language and contribute URDU---the first ever spontaneous Urdu-language speech emotion database. Evaluations are performed using three different Western languages against Urdu and…
In emotion recognition in conversation (ERC), the emotion of the current utterance is predicted by considering the previous context, which can be utilized in many natural language processing tasks. Although multiple emotions can coexist in a given sentence, most previous approaches take the perspective of a classification task to predict only a given label. However, it is expensive and difficult to label the emotion of a sentence with confidence or multi-label. In this paper, we automatically construct a grayscale label considering the correlation between emotions and use it for learning. That…
Large Language Models Meet Contrastive Learning: Zero-Shot Emotion Recognition Across Languages
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Southwest Jiaotong University（西南交通大学）；Kash Institute of Electronics and Information Industry（Kash电子信息产业研究院）；Southwest Petroleum University（西南石油大学）
Speech emotion recognition is a challenging task and an important step towards more natural human-machine interaction. We show that pre-trained language models can be fine-tuned for text emotion recognition, achieving an accuracy of 69.5% on Task 4A of SemEval 2017, improving upon the previous state of the art by over 3% absolute. We combine these language models with speech emotion recognition, achieving results of 73.5% accuracy when using provided transcriptions and speech data on a subset of four classes of the IEMOCAP dataset. The use of noise-induced transcriptions and speech data result…
A benchmark for joint dialogue satisfaction, emotion recognition, and emotion state transition prediction
School of Computer Science and Technology, Xinjiang University（新疆大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), China Telecom Corp Ltd（人工智能研究所（TeleAI））；Joint International Research Laboratory of Silk Road Multilingual Cognitive Computing（丝绸之路多语种认知计算联合国际实验室）；Xinjiang Key Laboratory of Multi-lingual Information Technology（新疆多语种信息处理重点实验室）
EmotionQueen: A Benchmark for Evaluating Empathy of Large Language Models
Fudan University（复旦大学）；School of Computer Science, Fudan University（复旦大学计算机科学学院）；Beijing Yuandian Technology（北京原点科技）；School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学工程与应用科学学院）
Emotion recognition and classification is a very active area of research. In this paper, we present a first approach to emotion classification using persistent entropy and support vector machines. A topology-based model is applied to obtain a single real number from each raw signal. These data are used as input of a support vector machine to classify signals into 8 different emotions (calm, happy, sad, angry, fearful, disgust and surprised).
Department of Computer Science, Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学计算机科学系）
The majority of existing speech emotion recognition models are trained and evaluated on a single corpus and a single language setting. These systems do not perform as well when applied in a cross-corpus and cross-language scenario. This paper presents results for speech emotion recognition for 4 languages in both single corpus and cross corpus setting. Additionally, since multi-task learning (MTL) with gender, naturalness and arousal as auxiliary tasks has shown to enhance the generalisation capabilities of the emotion models, this paper introduces language ID as another auxiliary task in MTL …
Central South University（中南大学）；Hunan University（湖南大学）
Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) aims to analyze the speaker's state and identify their emotion in the conversation. Recent works in ERC focus on context modeling but ignore the representation of contextual emotional tendency. In order to extract multi-modal information and the emotional tendency of the utterance effectively, we propose a new structure named Emoformer to extract multi-modal emotion vectors from different modalities and fuse them with sentence vector to be an emotion capsule. Furthermore, we design an end-to-end ERC model called EmoCaps, which extracts emotion vectors …
Emotion recognition has become a popular topic of interest, especially in the field of human computer interaction. Previous works involve unimodal analysis of emotion, while recent efforts focus on multi-modal emotion recognition from vision and speech. In this paper, we propose a new method of learning about the hidden representations between just speech and text data using convolutional attention networks. Compared to the shallow model which employs simple concatenation of feature vectors, the proposed attention model performs much better in classifying emotion from speech and text data cont…
The Experimental High School Attached to Beijing Normal University（北京师范大学附属实验中学）
A speech emotion recognition algorithm based on multi-feature and Multi-lingual fusion is proposed in order to resolve low recognition accuracy caused by lack of large speech dataset and low robustness of acoustic features in the recognition of speech emotion. First, handcrafted and deep automatic features are extracted from existing data in Chinese and English speech emotions. Then, the various features are fused respectively. Finally, the fused features of different languages are fused again and trained in a classification model. Distinguishing the fused features with the unfused ones, the r…
Automatic emotion recognition is one of the central concerns of the Human-Computer Interaction field as it can bridge the gap between humans and machines. Current works train deep learning models on low-level data representations to solve the emotion recognition task. Since emotion datasets often have a limited amount of data, these approaches may suffer from overfitting, and they may learn based on superficial cues. To address these issues, we propose a novel cross-representation speech model, inspired by disentanglement representation learning, to perform emotion recognition on wav2vec 2.0 s…
DiDi Chuxing（滴滴出行）；DiDi Research America（滴滴美国研究院）；Peking University（北京大学）
Speech emotion recognition is a challenging problem because human convey emotions in subtle and complex ways. For emotion recognition on human speech, one can either extract emotion related features from audio signals or employ speech recognition techniques to generate text from speech and then apply natural language processing to analyze the sentiment. Further, emotion recognition will be beneficial from using audio-textual multimodal information, it is not trivial to build a system to learn from multimodality. One can build models for two input sources separately and combine them in a decisi…
In this work, we conduct an extensive comparison of various approaches to speech based emotion recognition systems. The analyses were carried out on audio recordings from Ryerson Audio-Visual Database of Emotional Speech and Song (RAVDESS). After pre-processing the raw audio files, features such as Log-Mel Spectrogram, Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs), pitch and energy were considered. The significance of these features for emotion classification was compared by applying methods such as Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) …
Numediart Institute（Numediart研究所）；University of Mons（蒙斯大学）
During the last decade, the applications of signal processing have drastically improved with deep learning. However areas of affecting computing such as emotional speech synthesis or emotion recognition from spoken language remains challenging. In this paper, we investigate the use of a neural Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) as a feature extractor for emotion recognition. We show that these features outperform the eGeMAPS feature set to predict the valence and arousal emotional dimensions, which means that the audio-to-text mapping learning by the ASR system contain information related to t…
Tianjin University（天津大学）；Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（日本北陆先端科学技术大学院大学）
Recently, increasing attention has been directed to the study of the speech emotion recognition, in which global acoustic features of an utterance are mostly used to eliminate the content differences. However, the expression of speech emotion is a dynamic process, which is reflected through dynamic durations, energies, and some other prosodic information when one speaks. In this paper, a novel local dynamic pitch probability distribution feature, which is obtained by drawing the histogram, is proposed to improve the accuracy of speech emotion recognition. Compared with most of the previous wor…
Mercedes-Benz Research & Development, Daimler AG（梅赛德斯-奔驰研发中心，戴姆勒股份公司）；University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）
The recognition of emotions by humans is a complex process which considers multiple interacting signals such as facial expressions and both prosody and semantic content of utterances. Commonly, research on automatic recognition of emotions is, with few exceptions, limited to one modality. We describe an in-car experiment for emotion recognition from speech interactions for three modalities: the audio signal of a spoken interaction, the visual signal of the driver's face, and the manually transcribed content of utterances of the driver. We use off-the-shelf tools for emotion detection in audio …
Conversational emotion recognition (CER) has attracted increasing interests in the natural language processing (NLP) community. Different from the vanilla emotion recognition, effective speaker-sensitive utterance representation is one major challenge for CER. In this paper, we exploit speaker identification (SI) as an auxiliary task to enhance the utterance representation in conversations. By this method, we can learn better speaker-aware contextual representations from the additional SI corpus. Experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed architecture is highly effecti…
Emotion-Anchored Contrastive Learning Framework for Emotion Recognition in Conversation
National Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University（南京大学计算机软件新技术国家重点实验室）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University（南京大学人工智能学院）
Traditionally, in paralinguistic analysis for emotion detection from speech, emotions have been identified with discrete or dimensional (continuous-valued) labels. Accordingly, models that have been proposed for emotion detection use one or the other of these label types. However, psychologists like Russell and Plutchik have proposed theories and models that unite these views, maintaining that these representations have shared and complementary information. This paper is an attempt to validate these viewpoints computationally. To this end, we propose a model to jointly predict continuous and d…
The continuous dimensional emotion modelled by arousal and valence can depict complex changes of emotions. In this paper, we present our works on arousal and valence predictions for One-Minute-Gradual (OMG) Emotion Challenge. Multimodal representations are first extracted from videos using a variety of acoustic, video and textual models and support vector machine (SVM) is then used for fusion of multimodal signals to make final predictions. Our solution achieves Concordant Correlation Coefficient (CCC) scores of 0.397 and 0.520 on arousal and valence respectively for the validation dataset, wh…
