  The aim of this work is to define a speech emotion recognition (SER) model
able to recognize positive, neutral and negative emotions in natural
conversations of Italian elderly people. Several datasets for SER are available
in the literature. However most of them are in English or Chinese, have been
recorded while actors and actresses pronounce short phrases and thus are not
related to natural conversation. Moreover only few speeches among all the
databases are related to elderly people. Therefore, in this work, a
multi-language and multi-age corpus is considered merging a dataset in English,
that includes also elderly people, with a dataset in Italian. A general model,
trained on young and adult English actors and actresses is proposed, based on
XGBoost. Then two strategies of domain adaptation are proposed to adapt the
model either to elderly people and to Italian speakers. The results suggest
that this approach increases the classification performance, underlining also
that new datasets should be collected.
