Modeling Uncertainty in Predicting Emotional Attributes from Spontaneous Speech

A challenging task in affective computing is to build reliable speech emotion recognition (SER) systems that can accurately predict emotional attributes from spontaneous speech. To increase the trust in these SER systems, it is important to predict not only their accuracy, but also their confidence. An intriguing approach to predict uncertainty is Monte Carlo (MC) dropout, which obtains predictions from multiple feed-forward passes through a deep neural network (DNN) by using dropout regularization in both training and inference. This study evaluates this approach with regression models to predict emotional attribute scores for valence, arousal and dominance. The analysis illustrates that predicting uncertainty in this problem is possible, where the performance is higher for samples in the test set with lower uncertainty. The study evaluates uncertainty estimation as a function of the emotional attributes, showing that samples with extreme values have lower uncertainty. Finally, we demonstrate the benefits of uncertainty estimation with reject option, where a classifier can decline to give a prediction when its confidence is low. By rejecting only 25% of the test set with the highest uncertainty, we achieve relative performance gains of 7.34% for arousal, 13.73% for valence and 8.79% for dominance.