{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/2506-08717","title":"Multi-Teacher Language-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Multilingual Speech Emotion Recognition","arxiv_id":"2506.08717","date":"2025-06-10","proceeding":null,"authors":["Mehedi Hasan Bijoy","Dejan Porjazovski","Tamás Grósz","Mikko Kurimo"],"abstract":"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.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08717v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08717v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"2506-08717","repo_url":"https://github.com/aalto-speech/mtkd4ser","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"emotion-recognition","task_name":"Emotion Recognition"},{"task_slug":"knowledge-distillation","task_name":"Knowledge Distillation"},{"task_slug":"speech-emotion-recognition","task_name":"Speech Emotion Recognition"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"knowledge-distillation","method_name":"Knowledge Distillation"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}