More Like this

1. Quantifying Emotional Similarity in Speech

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TAFFC.2021.3127390  

   Harvill, John ; Leem, Seong-Gyun ; AbdelWahab, Mohammed ; Lotfian, Reza ; Busso, Carlos ( April 2023 , IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing)

   NA (Ed.)

   This study proposes the novel formulation of measuring emotional similarity between speech recordings. This formulation explores the ordinal nature of emotions by comparing emotional similarities instead of predicting an emotional attribute, or recognizing an emotional category. The proposed task determines which of two alternative samples has the most similar emotional content to the emotion of a given anchor. This task raises some interesting questions. Which is the emotional descriptor that provide the most suitable space to assess emotional similarities? Can deep neural networks (DNNs) learn representations to robustly quantify emotional similarities? We address these questions by exploring alternative emotional spaces created with attribute-based descriptors and categorical emotions. We create the representation using a DNN trained with the triplet loss function, which relies on triplets formed with an anchor, a positive example, and a negative example. We select a positive sample that has similar emotion content to the anchor, and a negative sample that has dissimilar emotion to the anchor. The task of our DNN is to identify the positive sample. The experimental evaluations demonstrate that we can learn a meaningful embedding to assess emotional similarities, achieving higher performance than human evaluators asked to complete the same task. 

   more » « less
2. Preference Learning Labels by Anchoring on Consecutive Annotations

   https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2023-1108  

   Naini, Abinay Reddy ; Salman, Ali N. ; Busso, Carlos ( August 2023 , Interspeech 2023)

   An important task in human-computer interaction is to rank speech samples according to their expressive content. A preference learning framework is appropriate for obtaining an emotional rank for a set of speech samples. However, obtaining reliable labels for training a preference learning framework is a challenging task. Most existing databases provide sentence-level absolute attribute scores annotated by multiple raters, which have to be transformed to obtain preference labels. Previous studies have shown that evaluators anchor their absolute assessments on previously annotated samples. Hence, this study proposes a novel formulation for obtaining preference learning labels by only considering annotation trends assigned by a rater to consecutive samples within an evaluation session. The experiments show that the use of the proposed anchor-based ordinal labels leads to significantly better performance than models trained using existing alternative labels. 

   more » « less
3. Improving Speech Emotion Recognition Using Self-Supervised Learning with Domain-Specific Audiovisual Tasks

   https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2022-11012  

   Goncalves, Lucas ; Busso, Carlos ( September 2022 , Interspeech 2022)

   Speech emotion recognition (SER) is a challenging task due to the limited availability of real-world labeled datasets. Since it is easier to find unlabeled data, the use of self-supervised learning (SSL) has become an attractive alternative. This study proposes new pre-text tasks for SSL to improve SER. While our target application is SER, the proposed pre-text tasks include audio-visual formulations, leveraging the relationship between acoustic and facial features. Our proposed approach introduces three new unimodal and multimodal pre-text tasks that are carefully designed to learn better representations for predicting emotional cues from speech. Task 1 predicts energy variations (high or low) from a speech sequence. Task 2 uses speech features to predict facial activation (high or low) based on facial landmark movements. Task 3 performs a multi-class emotion recognition task on emotional labels obtained from combinations of action units (AUs) detected across a video sequence. We pre-train a network with 60.92 hours of unlabeled data, fine-tuning the model for the downstream SER task. The results on the CREMA-D dataset show that the model pre-trained on the proposed domain-specific pre-text tasks significantly improves the precision (up to 5.1%), recall (up to 4.5%), and F1-scores (up to 4.9%) of our SER system. 

   more » « less
4. Modeling Uncertainty in Predicting Emotional Attributes from Spontaneous Speech

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP40776.2020.9054237  

   Sridhar, Kusha ; Busso, Carlos ( May 2020 , IEEE international conference on acoustics, speech and signal processing (ICASSP 2020))

   A challenging task in affective computing is to build reliable speech emotion recognition (SER) systems that can accurately predict emotional attributes from spontaneous speech. To increase the trust in these SER systems, it is important to predict not only their accuracy, but also their confidence. An intriguing approach to predict uncertainty is Monte Carlo (MC) dropout, which obtains pre- dictions from multiple feed-forward passes through a deep neural network (DNN) by using dropout regularization in both training and inference. This study evaluates this approach with regression models to predict emotional attribute scores for valence, arousal and dom- inance. The analysis illustrates that predicting uncertainty in this problem is possible, where the performance is higher for samples in the test set with lower uncertainty. The study evaluates uncertainty estimation as a function of the emotional attributes, showing that samples with extreme values have lower uncertainty. Finally, we demonstrate the benefits of uncertainty estimation with reject option, where a classifier can decline to give a prediction when its confi- dence is low. By rejecting only 25% of the test set with the highest uncertainty, we achieve relative performance gains of 7.34% for arousal, 13.73% for valence and 8.79% for dominance. 

   more » « less
5. Predicting Categorical Emotions by Jointly Learning Primary and Secondary Emotions through Multitask Learning

   https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2018-2464  

   Lotfian, Reza ; Busso, Carlos ( September 2018 , Interspeech 2018)

   Detection of human emotions is an essential part of affect-aware human-computer interaction (HCI). In daily conversations, the preferred way of describing affects is by using categorical emotion labels (e.g., sad, anger, surprise). In categorical emotion classification, multiple descriptors (with different degrees of relevance) can be assigned to a sample. Perceptual evaluations have relied on primary and secondary emotions to capture the ambiguous nature of spontaneous recordings. Primary emotion is the most relevant category felt by the evaluator. Secondary emotions capture other emotional cues also conveyed in the stimulus. In most cases, the labels collected from the secondary emotions are discarded, since assigning a single class label to a sample is preferred from an application perspective. In this work, we take advantage of both types of annotations to improve the performance of emotion classification. We collect the labels from all the annotations available for a sample and generate primary and secondary emotion labels. A classifier is then trained using multitask learning with both primary and secondary emotions. We experimentally show that considering secondary emotion labels during the learning process leads to relative improvements of 7.9% in F1-score for an 8-class emotion classification task. 

   more » « less