Achieving Fair Speech Emotion Recognition via Perceptual Fairness

Speech emotion recognition (SER) is a key technological module to be integrated into many voice-based solutions. One of the unique fairness issues in SER is caused by the inherently biased emotion perception given by the raters as ground truth labels. Mitigating rater biases are at core for SER to move toward optimizing both recognition and fairness performance. In this work, we proposed a two-stage framework, which produces debiased representations by using a fairness constraint adversarial framework in the first stage. Then, users are endued with the right to toggle between specified gender-wise perceptions on-demand after the gender-wise perceptual learning in the second stage. We further evaluate our results on two important fairness metrics to show that the distributions and predictions across different gender are fair.