EmoTech: A Multi-modal Speech Emotion Recognition Using Multi-source Low-level Information with Hybrid Recurrent Network

Emotion recognition is a critical task in human-computer interaction, enabling more intuitive and responsive systems. This study presents a multimodal emotion recognition system that combines low-level information from audio and text, leveraging both Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Networks (BiLSTMs). The proposed system consists of two parallel networks: an Audio Block and a Text Block. Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) are extracted and processed by a BiLSTM network and a 2D convolutional network to capture low-level intrinsic and extrinsic features from speech. Simultaneously, a combined BiLSTM-CNN network extracts the low-level sequential nature of text from word embeddings corresponding to the available audio. This low-level information from speech and text is then concatenated and processed by several fully connected layers to classify the speech emotion. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed EmoTech accurately recognizes emotions from combined audio and text inputs, achieving an overall accuracy of 84%. This solution outperforms previously proposed approaches for the same dataset and modalities.