Modeling gender information for emotion recognition using Denoising autoencoder

The Denoising autoencoder (DAE) has been successfully applied to acoustic emotion recognition lately. In this paper, we adopt the framework of the modified DAE introduced in that projects the input signal to two different hidden representations, for neutral and emotional speech respectively, and uses the emotional representation for the classification task. We propose to model gender information for more robust emotional representation in this work. For neutral representation, male and female dependent DAEs are built using non-emotional speech with the aim of capturing distinct information between the two genders. The emotional hidden representation is shared for the two genders in order to model more emotion specific characteristics, and is used as features in a back-end classifier for emotion recognition. We propose different optimization objectives in training the DAEs. Our experimental results show improvement on unweighted accuracy compared with previous work using the modified DAE method and the classifiers using the standard static features. Further performance gain can be achieved by structural level system combination.