Integrating Emotion Recognition with Speech Recognition and Speaker Diarisation for Conversations

Although automatic emotion recognition (AER) has recently drawn significant research interest, most current AER studies use manually segmented utterances, which are usually unavailable for dialogue systems. This paper proposes integrating AER with automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speaker diarisation (SD) in a jointly-trained system. Distinct output layers are built for four sub-tasks including AER, ASR, voice activity detection and speaker classification based on a shared encoder. Taking the audio of a conversation as input, the integrated system finds all speech segments and transcribes the corresponding emotion classes, word sequences, and speaker identities. Two metrics are proposed to evaluate AER performance with automatic segmentation based on time-weighted emotion and speaker classification errors. Results on the IEMOCAP dataset show that the proposed system consistently outperforms two baselines with separately trained single-task systems on AER, ASR and SD.