Temporal Oriented ResNet for Gaming Dimensional Emotion Prediction

Voice interfaces are increasingly popular in games, with players’ emotional expressions rapidly and continuously changing during game-play. Thus, to adapt and customise player experiences, designers would highly benefit from emotion recognition tools, which are able to provide fine grained changes in player emotions on continuous dimensions. To this end, we utilised our previous speech dataset: the Multimodel Frustration Game Database (MFGD), which was collected for binary classification of frustration in game-play. In this study, we added new annotation which describes continuous levels of valence and arousal. Meanwhile, in order to extract more robust features shared between both dimensions, a multi-task learning framework which jointly learns valence-arousal representations is developed. Furthermore, a Temporal Oriented ResNet is suggested to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed system. The proposed framework effectively predicts players’ arousal and valence from speech, as shown by the obtained Mean Absolute Error (MAE) (arousal: 0.0055, valence: 0.0055), which significantly outperforms the conventional ResNet18 baseline results (arousal: 0.0081, valence: 0.0129).