A Hybrid Neural Emotion Recogniser for Human-Robotic Agent Interaction

This paper presents a hybrid neural approach to emotion recognition from speech, which combines feature selection using principal component analysis (PCA) with unsupervised neural clustering through self-organising map (SOM). Given the importance that is associated with emotions in humans, it is unlikely that robots will be accepted as anything more that machines if they do not express and recognise emotions. In this paper, we describe the performance of an unsupervised approach to emotion recognition that achieves similar performance to current supervised intelligent approaches. Performance, however, reduces when the system is tested using samples from a male volunteer not in the training set using a low cost microphone. Through the use of an unsupervised neural approach, it is possible to go beyond the basic binary classification of emotions to consider the similarity between emotions and whether speech can express multiple emotions at the same time