Synthesized speech for model training in cross-corpus recognition of human emotion

Recognizing speakers in emotional conditions remains a challenging issue, since speaker states such as emotion affect the acoustic parameters used in typical speaker recognition systems. Thus, it is believed that knowledge of the current speaker emotion can improve speaker recognition in real life conditions. Conversely, speech emotion recognition still has to overcome several barriers before it can be employed in realistic situations, as is already the case with speech and speaker recognition. One of these barriers is the lack of suitable training data, both in quantity and quality—especially data that allow recognizers to generalize across application scenarios (‘cross-corpus’ setting). In previous work, we have shown that in principle, the usage of synthesized emotional speech for model training can be beneficial for recognition of human emotions from speech. In this study, we aim at consolidating these first results in a large-scale cross-corpus evaluation on eight of most frequently used human emotional speech corpora, namely ABC, AVIC, DES, EMO-DB, eNTERFACE, SAL, SUSAS and VAM, covering natural, induced and acted emotion as well as a variety of application scenarios and acoustic conditions. Synthesized speech is evaluated standalone as well as in joint training with human speech. Our results show that the usage of synthesized emotional speech in acoustic model training can significantly improve recognition of arousal from human speech in the challenging cross-corpus setting. B. Schuller ( ) · Z. Zhang · F. Weninger Institute for Human-Machine Communication, Technische Universität München, 80290 München, Germany e-mail: [email protected] F. Burkhardt Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Berlin, Germany