Exploring Self-Supervised Multi-view Contrastive Learning for Speech Emotion Recognition with Limited Annotations

Recent advancements in Deep and Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) have led to substantial improvements in Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) performance, reaching unprecedented levels. However, obtaining sufficient amounts of accurately labeled data for training or fine-tuning the models remains a costly and challenging task. In this paper, we propose a multi-view SSL pre-training technique that can be applied to various representations of speech, including the ones generated by large speech models, to improve SER performance in scenarios where annotations are limited. Our experiments, based on wav2vec 2.0, spectral and paralinguistic features, demonstrate that the proposed framework boosts the SER performance, by up to 10% in Unweighted Average Recall, in settings with extremely sparse data annotations.

GANtron: Emotional Speech Synthesis with Generative Adversarial Networks

Speech synthesis is used in a wide variety of industries. Nonetheless, it always sounds flat or robotic. The state of the art methods that allow for prosody control are very cumbersome to use and do not allow easy tuning. To tackle some of these drawbacks, in this work we target the implementation of a text-to-speech model where the inferred speech can be tuned with the desired emotions. To do so, we use Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) together with a sequence-to-sequence model using an attention mechanism. We evaluate four different configurations considering different inputs and training strategies, study them and prove how our best model can generate speech files that lie in the same distribution as the initial training dataset. Additionally, a new strategy to boost the training convergence by applying a guided attention loss is proposed.