# Improving Speech Emotion Recognition with Unsupervised Speaking Style Transfer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.08843 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08843/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [SpecAugment: A Simple Data Augmentation Method for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08779/) (2019)
- [HiFi-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Efficient and High Fidelity Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05646/) (2020)
- [Natural TTS Synthesis by Conditioning WaveNet on Mel Spectrogram Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05884/) (2017)
- [Scheduled Sampling for Sequence Prediction with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03099/) (2015)
- [data2vec: A General Framework for Self-supervised Learning in Speech, Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03555/) (2022)
- [ECAPA-TDNN: Emphasized Channel Attention, Propagation and Aggregation in TDNN Based Speaker Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07143/) (2020)
- [Attention-Based Models for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.07503/) (2015)
- [LRS3-TED: a large-scale dataset for visual speech recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00496/) (2018)
- [Style Tokens: Unsupervised Style Modeling, Control and Transfer in End-to-End Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09017/) (2018)
- [Dawn of the transformer era in speech emotion recognition: closing the valence gap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07378/) (2022)
- [Speech Emotion Recognition with Co-Attention based Multi-level Acoustic Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15326/) (2022)
- [Transforming Spectrum and Prosody for Emotional Voice Conversion with Non-Parallel Training Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00198/) (2020)
- [CNN+LSTM Architecture for Speech Emotion Recognition with Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05630/) (2018)
- [CopyPaste: An Augmentation Method for Speech Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14602/) (2020)
- [On the Robustness of Speech Emotion Recognition for Human-Robot Interaction with Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02173/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Missing-by-Design: Certifiable Modality Deletion for Revocable Multimodal Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16144/) (2026)
- [Emotion Collider: Dual Hyperbolic Mirror Manifolds for Sentiment Recovery via Anti Emotion Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16161/) (2026)
- [ModalImmune: Immunity Driven Unlearning via Self Destructive Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16197/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Humans can effortlessly modify various prosodic attributes, such as the placement of stress and the intensity of sentiment, to convey a specific emotion while maintaining consistent linguistic content. Motivated by this capability, we propose EmoAug, a novel style transfer model designed to enhance emotional expression and tackle the data scarcity issue in speech emotion recognition tasks. EmoAug consists of a semantic encoder and a paralinguistic encoder that represent verbal and non-verbal information respectively. Additionally, a decoder reconstructs speech signals by conditioning on the aforementioned two information flows in an unsupervised fashion. Once training is completed, EmoAug enriches expressions of emotional speech with different prosodic attributes, such as stress, rhythm and intensity, by feeding different styles into the paralinguistic encoder. EmoAug enables us to generate similar numbers of samples for each class to tackle the data imbalance issue as well. Experimental results on the IEMOCAP dataset demonstrate that EmoAug can successfully transfer different speaking styles while retaining the speaker identity and semantic content. Furthermore, we train a SER model with data augmented by EmoAug and show that the augmented model not only surpasses the state-of-the-art supervised and self-supervised methods but also overcomes overfitting problems caused by data imbalance. Some audio samples can be found on our demo website.