Spontaneous Speech Emotion Recognition

A monograph covering our work in the area of emotion analysis in spontaneous speech

Intelligent human-computer interaction (iHCI) demands the comprises of several technologies, namely automatic speech recognition (ASR), speaker identification, language identification, image and video recognition, affect |mood |emotion analysis and recognition to name a few. Given the importance of spontaneity in any human-machine conversational speech, reliable recognition of emotion from naturally spoken spontaneous speech is very crucial. While emotions when explicitly demonstrated by an actor are easy for a machine to recognize, the same is not true in case of day to day, naturally spoken spontaneous speech even though emotion of the speaker are embedded in their speech. One of the main reasons for this is that people, especially non actors, do not explicitly demonstrate their emotion when they speak, thus making it difficult for machines to recognize the emotion embedded in their spoken speech. In this short monogram, based on some of our previous published work, we identify the challenges in recognizing emotions in spontaneous speech and put forth a framework that can assist in determining the emotions expressed in spontaneous speech.