2024/07/25 by Leem, Seong-Gyun, Fulford, Daniel, Onnela, Jukka-Pekka +2 · 1 citation
#Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Sound (cs.SD) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2407.17716
Speech emotion recognition (SER) systems often struggle in real-world environments, where ambient noise severely degrades their performance. This paper explores a novel approach that exploits prior knowledge of testing environments to maximize SER performance under noisy conditions. To address this task, we propose a text-guided, environment-aware training where an SER model is trained with contaminated speech samples and their paired noise description. We use a pre-trained text encoder to extract the text-based environment embedding and then fuse it to a transformer-based SER model during training and inference. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through our experiment with the MSP-Podcast corpus and real-world additive noise samples collected from the Freesound and DEMAND repositories. Our experiment indicates that the text-based environment descriptions processed by a large language model (LLM) produce representations that improve the noise-robustness of the SER system. With a contrastive learning (CL)-based representation, our proposed method can be improved by jointly fine-tuning the text encoder with the emotion recognition model. Under the -5dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) level, fine-tuning the text encoder improves our CL-based representation method by 76.4% (arousal), 100.0% (dominance), and 27.7% (valence).