Hierarchical clustering and classification of emotions in human speech using confusion matrices

Abstract

Although most of the natural emotions expressed in speech can be clearly identified by humans, automatic classification systems still display significant limitations on this task. Recently, hierarchical strategies have been proposed using different heuristics for choosing the appropriate levels in the hierarchy. In this paper, we propose a method for choosing these levels by hierarchically clustering a confusion matrix. To this end, a Mexican Spanish emotional speech database was created and employed to classify the 'big six' emotions (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise) together with a neutral state. A set of 14 features was extracted from the speech signal of each utterance and a hierarchical classifier was defined from the dendrogram obtained by applying Wards clustering method to a certain confusion matrix. The classification rate of this hierarchical classifier showed a slight improvement compared to those of various classifiers trained directly with all 7 classes. © 2013 Springer International Publishing.