Papers › Multi-Teacher Language-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Multilingual Speech Emotion Recognition

Multi-Teacher Language-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Multilingual Speech Emotion Recognition

10 Jun 2025arXiv:2506.08717archive 2025-07-28

Mehedi Hasan Bijoy, Dejan Porjazovski, Tamás Grósz, Mikko Kurimo

Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) is crucial for improving human-computer interaction. Despite strides in monolingual SER, extending them to build a multilingual system remains challenging. Our goal is to train a single model capable of multilingual SER by distilling knowledge from multiple teacher models. To address this, we introduce a novel language-aware multi-teacher knowledge distillation method to advance SER in English, Finnish, and French. It leverages Wav2Vec2.0 as the foundation of monolingual teacher models and then distills their knowledge into a single multilingual student model. The student model demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, with a weighted recall of 72.9 on the English dataset and an unweighted recall of 63.4 on the Finnish dataset, surpassing fine-tuning and knowledge distillation baselines. Our method excels in improving recall for sad and neutral emotions, although it still faces challenges in recognizing anger and happiness.

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Emotion RecognitionKnowledge DistillationSpeech Emotion Recognition

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Knowledge Distillation

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