Recognition of Emotions in Mexican Spanish Speech: An Approach Based on Acoustic Modelling of Emotion-Specific Vowels

Abstract EN

An approach for the recognition of emotions in speech is presented.

The target language is Mexican Spanish, and for this purpose a speech database was created.

The approach consists in the phoneme acoustic modelling of emotion-specific vowels.

For this, a standard phoneme-based Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system was built with Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), where different phoneme HMMs were built for the consonants and emotion-specific vowels associated with four emotional states (anger, happiness, neutral, sadness).

Then, estimation of the emotional state from a spoken sentence is performed by counting the number of emotion-specific vowels found in the ASR’s output for the sentence.

With this approach, accuracy of 87–100% was achieved for the recognition of emotional state of Mexican Spanish speech.