Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: This study introduces a method to design a curriculum for machine-learning to maximize the efficiency during the training process of deep neural networks (DNNs) for speech emotion recognition. Previous studies in other machine-learning problems have shown the benefits of training a classifier following a curriculum where samples are gradually presented in increasing level of difficulty. For speech emotion recognition, the challenge is to establish a natural order of difficulty in the training set to create the curriculum. We address this problem by assuming that, ambiguous samples for humans are also ambiguous for computers. Speech samples are often annotated by multiple evaluators to account for differences in emotion perception across individuals. While some sentences with clear emotional content are consistently annotated, sentences with more ambiguous emotional content present important disagreement between individual evaluations. We propose to use the disagreement between evaluators as a measure of difficulty for the classification task. We propose metrics that quantify the inter-evaluation agreement to define the curriculum for regression problems and binary and multi-class classification problems. The experimental results consistently show that relying on a curriculum based on agreement between human judgments leads to statistically significant improvements over baselines trained without a curriculum.
Authors: Reza Lotfian, Carlos Busso
Institution: The University of Texas at Dallas
Language: English
Topic: Emotion and Mood Recognition
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
Funder: National Science Foundation
OpenAlex ID: W2804664105