Title
Emotion recognition using a hierarchical binary decision tree approach
Abstract
Automated emotion state tracking is a crucial element in the computational study of human communication behaviors. It is important to design robust and reliable emotion recognition systems that are suitable for real-world applications both to enhance analytical abilities to support human decision making and to design human-machine interfaces that facilitate efficient communication. We introduce a hierarchical computational structure to recognize emotions. The proposed structure maps an input speech utterance into one of the multiple emotion classes through subsequent layers of binary classifications. The key idea is that the levels in the tree are designed to solve the easiest classification tasks first, allowing us to mitigate error propagation. We evaluated the classification framework on two different emotional databases using acoustic features, the AIBO database and the USC IEMOCAP database. In the case of the AIBO database, we obtain a balanced recall on each of the individual emotion classes using this hierarchical structure. The performance measure of the average unweighted recall on the evaluation data set improves by 3.37% absolute (8.82% relative) over a Support Vector Machine baseline model. In the USC IEMOCAP database, we obtain an absolute improvement of 7.44% (14.58%) over a baseline Support Vector Machine modeling. The results demonstrate that the presented hierarchical approach is effective for classifying emotional utterances in multiple database contexts.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1016/j.specom.2011.06.004
Speech Communication
Keywords
DocType
Volume
individual emotion class,hierarchical binary decision tree,reliable emotion recognition system,automated emotion state tracking,hierarchical structure,hierarchical approach,multiple database context,multiple emotion class,hierarchical computational structure,aibo database,usc iemocap database,human machine interface,error propagation,support vector machine,logistic regression,binary classification,decision tree
Conference
53
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
9-10
0167-6393
121
PageRank 
References 
Authors
3.70
19
5
Search Limit
100121
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Chi-Chun Lee165449.41
Emily Mower2106259.08
Carlos Busso3161693.04
Sungbok Lee4139484.13
Narayanan Shrikanth55558439.23