Hierarchical Clustering and Classification of Emotions in Human Speech Using Confusion Matrices

MANUEL REYES-VARGAS; MAX SÁNCHEZ-GUTIÉRREZ; HUGO L. RUFINER; ENRIQUE M. ALBORNOZ; FABIOLA MARTÍNEZ-LICONA; JOHN GODDARD-CLOSE

Pilsen

Conferencia; 15th International Conference SPECOM; 2013

Faculty of Applied Sciences, University of West Bohemia Plzeň (Pilsen) and SPIIRAS, St. Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation Russian Academy of Sciences

Although most of the natural emotions expressed in speech can be clearly identified by humans, automatic classification systems still display significant limitations on this task. Recently, hierarchical strategies have been proposed using different heuristics for choosing the appropriate levels in the hierarchy. In this paper, we propose a method for choosing these levels by hierarchically clustering a confusion matrix. To this end, a Mexican Spanish emotional speech database was created and employed to classify the ?big six? emotions (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise) together with a neutral state. A set of 14 features was extracted from the speech signal of each utterance and a hierarchical classifier was defined from the dendrogram obtained by applying Wards clustering method to a certain confusion matrix. The classification rate of this hierarchical classifier showed a slight improvement compared to those of various classifiers trained directly with all 7 classes.