EXTENDED SPEECH EMOTION RECOGNITION AND PREDICTION

Abstract

Humans are considered to reason and act rationally and that is believed to be their fundamental difference from the rest of the living entities. Furthermore, modern approaches in the science of psychology underline that humans as a thinking creatures are also sentimental and emotional organisms. There are fifteen universal extended emotions plus neutral emotion: hot anger, cold anger, panic, fear, anxiety, despair, sadness, elation, happiness, interest, boredom, shame, pride, disgust, contempt and neutral position. The scope of the current research is to understand the emotional state of a human being by capturing the speech utterances that one uses during a common conversation. It is proved that having enough acoustic evidence available the emotional state of a person can be classified by a set of majority voting classifiers. The proposed set of classifiers is based on three main classifiers: kNN, C4.5 and SVM RBF Kernel. This set achieves better performance than each basic classifier taken separately. It is compared with two other sets of classifiers: one-against-all (OAA) multiclass SVM with Hybrid kernels and the set of classifiers which consists of the following two basic classifiers: C5.0 and Neural Network. The proposed variant achieves better performance than the other two sets of classifiers. The paper deals with emotion classification by a set of majority voting classifiers that combines three certain types of basic classifiers with low computational complexity. The basic classifiers stem from different theoretical background in order to avoid bias and redundancy which gives the proposed set of classifiers the ability to generalize in the emotion domain space.

Keywords

• speech emotion recognition
• affective computing
• machine learning