Transformer-based transfer learning and multi-task learning for improving the performance of speech emotion recognition

It is hard to prepare sufficient training data for speech emotion recognition due to the difficulty of emotion labeling. In this paper, we apply transfer learning with large-scale training data for speech recognition on a transformer-based model to improve the performance of speech emotion recognition. In addition, we propose a method to utilize context information without decoding by multi-task learning with speech recognition. According to the speech emotion recognition experiments using the IEMOCAP dataset, our model achieves a weighted accuracy of 70.6 % and an unweighted accuracy of 71.6 %, which shows that the proposed method is effective in improving the performance of speech emotion recognition.