Dilated Residual Network with Multi-head Self-attention for Speech Emotion Recognition

Speech emotion recognition (SER) plays an important role in intelligent speech interaction. One vital challenge in SER is to extract emotion-relevant features from speech signals. In state-of-the-art SER techniques, deep learning methods, e.g, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), are widely employed for feature learning and have achieved significant performance. However, in the CNN-oriented methods, two performance limitations have raised: 1) the loss of temporal structure of speech in the progressive resolution reduction; 2) the ignoring of relative dependencies between elements in suprasegmental feature sequence. In this paper, we proposed the combining use of Dilated Residual Network (DRN) and Multi-head Self-attention to alleviate the above limitations. By employing DRN, the network can retain high resolution of temporal structure in feature learning, with similar size of receptive field to CNN based approach. By employing Multi-head Self-attention, the network can model the inner dependencies between elements with different positions in the learned suprasegmental feature sequence, which enhances the importing of emotion-salient information. Experiments on emotional benchmarking dataset IEMOCAP have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed framework, with 11.7% to 18.6% relative improvement to state-of-the-art approaches.