Key-Sparse Transformer with Cascaded Cross-Attention Block for Multimodal Speech Emotion Recognition

Speech emotion recognition is a challenging and important research topic that plays a critical role in human-computer interaction. Multimodal inputs can improve the performance as more emotional information is used for recognition. However, existing studies learnt all the information in the sample while only a small portion of it is about emotion. Moreover, under the multimodal framework, the interaction between different modalities is shallow and insufficient. In this paper, a keysparse Transformer is proposed for efficient SER by only focusing on emotion related information. Furthermore, a cascaded cross-attention block, which is specially designed for multimodal framework, is introduced to achieve deep interaction between different modalities. The proposed method is evaluated by IEMOCAP corpus and the experimental results show that the proposed method gives better performance than the state-of-theart approaches.