A novel emotion recognizer from speech using both prosodic and linguistic features

Abstract

Emotion recognition based on speech characteristics generally relies on prosodic information. However, utterances with different emotions in speech have similar prosodic features, so it is difficult to recognize emotion by using only prosodic features. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to emotion recognition that considers both prosodic and linguistic features. First, possible emotions are output by clustering-based emotion recognizer, which only uses prosodic features. Then, subtitles given by the speech recognizer are input for another emotion recognizer based on the "Association Mechanism." It outputs a possible emotion by using only linguistic information. Lastly, the intersection of the two sets of possible emotions is integrated into the final result. Experimental results showed that the proposed method achieved higher performance than either prosodic- or linguistic-based emotion recognition. In a comparison with manually labeled data, the F-measure was 32.6%. On the other hand, the average of F-measures of labeled data given by other humans was 42.9%. This means that the proposed method performed at 75.9% in relation to human ability. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.