Segment-based emotion recognition from continuous Mandarin Chinese speech

Recognition of emotion in speech has recently matured to one of the key disciplines in speech analysis serving next generation human–machine interaction and communication. However, compared to automatic speech recognition, that emotion recognition from an isolated word or a phrase is inappropriate for conversation. Because a complete emotional expression may stride across several sentences, and may fetch-up on any word in dialogue. In this paper, we present a segment-based emotion recognition approach to continuous Mandarin Chinese speech. In this proposed approach, the unit for recognition is not a phrase or a sentence but an emotional expression in dialogue. To that end, the following procedures are presented: First, we evaluate the performance of several classifiers in short sentence speech emotion recognition architectures. The results of the experiments show that the WD-KNN classifier achieves the best accuracy for the 5-class emotion recognition what among the five classification techniques. We then implemented a continuous Mandarin Chinese speech emotion recognition system with an emotion radar chart which is based on WD-KNN; this system can represent the intensity of each emotion component in speech. This proposed approach shows how emotions can be recognized by speech signals, and in turn how emotional states can be visualized.