{Kenneth Liang Church Renjie Huang Jiahong Zheng Xingyu Yuan Cai}

Abstract

Speech emotion recognition (SER) classifies speech into emotion categories such as: Happy, Angry, Sad and Neutral. Recently , deep learning has been applied to the SER task. This paper proposes a multi-task learning (MTL) framework to simultaneously perform speech-to-text recognition and emotion classification, with an end-to-end deep neural model based on wav2vec-2.0. Experiments on the IEMOCAP benchmark show that the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the SER task. In addition, an ablation study establishes the effectiveness of the proposed MTL framework.