Two-Level Fusion to Improve Emotion Classification in Spoken Dialogue Systems

  • Authors:

  • Ramón López-Cózar;Zoraida Callejas;Martin Kroul;Jan Nouza;Jan Silovský

  • Affiliations:

  • Dept. of Languages and Computer Systems, University of Granada, Spain;Dept. of Languages and Computer Systems, University of Granada, Spain;Institute of Information Technology and Electronics, Technical University of Liberec, Czech Republic;Institute of Information Technology and Electronics, Technical University of Liberec, Czech Republic;Institute of Information Technology and Electronics, Technical University of Liberec, Czech Republic

  • Venue:
  • TSD '08 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

This paper proposes a technique to enhance emotion classification in spoken dialogue systems by means of two fusion modules. The first combines emotion predictions generated by a set of classifiers that deal with different kinds of information about each sentence uttered by the user. To do this, the module employs several fusion methods that produce other predictions about the emotional state of the user. The predictions are the input to the second fusion module, where they are combined to deduce the user's emotional state. Experiments have been carried out considering two emotion categories (`Non-negative' and `Negative') and classifiers that deal with prosodic, acoustic, lexical and dialogue acts information. The results show that the first fusion module significantly increases the classification rates of a baseline and the classifiers working separately, as has been observed previously in the literature. The novelty of the technique is the inclusion of the second fusion module, which enhances classification rate by 2.25% absolute.