Emotions in Spoken Language - Do we need acoustics?

Nadine Probol, Margot Mieskes


Abstract
Work on emotion detection is often focused on textual data from i.e. Social Media. If multimodal data (i.e. speech) is analysed, the focus again is often placed on the transcription. This paper takes a closer look at how crucial acoustic information actually is for the recognition of emotions from multimodal data. To this end we use the IEMOCAP data, which is one of the larger data sets that provides transcriptions, audio recordings and manual emotion categorization. We build models for emotion classification using text-only, acoustics-only and combining both modalities in order to examine the influence of the various modalities on the final categorization. Our results indicate that using text-only models outperform acoustics-only models. But combining text-only and acoustic-only models improves the results. Additionally, we perform a qualitative analysis and find that a range of misclassifications are due to factors not related to the model, but to the data such as, recording quality, a challenging classification task and misclassifications that are unsurprising for humans.
Anthology ID:
2023.wassa-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Jeremy Barnes, Orphée De Clercq, Roman Klinger
Venue:
WASSA
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
71–84
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.8
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.wassa-1.8
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nadine Probol and Margot Mieskes. 2023. Emotions in Spoken Language - Do we need acoustics?. In Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis, pages 71–84, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Emotions in Spoken Language - Do we need acoustics? (Probol & Mieskes, WASSA 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.8.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.8.mp4