How Paralingual are Paralinguistic Representations? A Case Study in Speech Emotion Recognition

Pre-trained Models (PTMs) have facilitated substantial progress in the field of Speech Emotion Recognition (SER). SER is an area with applications ranging from HumanComputer Interaction to Healthcare. Recent studies have leveraged various PTM representations as input features for downstream models for SER. PTM specifically pre-trained for paralinguistic tasks have obtained state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance for SER. However, such PTM haven't been evaluated for SER in multilingual settings and experimented only with English. So, we fill this gap, by performing a comprehensive comparative study of five PTMs (TRILLsson, wav2vec2, XLS-R, x-vector, Whisper) for assessing the effectiveness of paralingual PTM (TRILLsson) for SER across multiple languages. Representations from TRILLsson achieved the best performance among all the PTMs. This demonstrates that TRILLsson is able to effectively capture the various paralinguistic features from speech data for better SER. We also show that downstream models using TRILLsson representations achieve SOTA performance in terms of accuracy across various multi-lingual datasets.