Dimensionality reduction-based spoken emotion recognition

To improve effectively the performance on spoken emotion recognition, it is needed to perform nonlinear dimensionality reduction for speech data lying on a nonlinear manifold embedded in a high-dimensional acoustic space. In this paper, a new supervised manifold learning algorithm for nonlinear dimensionality reduction, called modified supervised locally linear embedding algorithm (MSLLE) is proposed for spoken emotion recognition. MSLLE aims at enlarging the interclass distance while shrinking the intraclass distance in an effort to promote the discriminating power and generalization ability of low-dimensional embedded data representations. To compare the performance of MSLLE, not only three unsupervised dimensionality reduction methods, i.e., principal component analysis (PCA), locally linear embedding (LLE) and isometric mapping (Isomap), but also five supervised dimensionality reduction methods, i.e., linear discriminant analysis (LDA), supervised locally linear embedding (SLLE), local Fisher discriminant analysis (LFDA), neighborhood component analysis (NCA) and maximally collapsing metric learning (MCML), are used to perform dimensionality reduction on spoken emotion recognition tasks. Experimental results on two emotional speech databases, i.e. the spontaneous Chinese database and the acted Berlin database, confirm the validity and promising performance of the proposed method.