  In this paper, we are interested in exploiting textual and acoustic data of
an utterance for the speech emotion classification task. The baseline approach
models the information from audio and text independently using two deep neural
networks (DNNs). The outputs from both the DNNs are then fused for
classification. As opposed to using knowledge from both the modalities
separately, we propose a framework to exploit acoustic information in tandem
with lexical data. The proposed framework uses two bi-directional long
short-term memory (BLSTM) for obtaining hidden representations of the
utterance. Furthermore, we propose an attention mechanism, referred to as the
multi-hop, which is trained to automatically infer the correlation between the
modalities. The multi-hop attention first computes the relevant segments of the
textual data corresponding to the audio signal. The relevant textual data is
then applied to attend parts of the audio signal. To evaluate the performance
of the proposed system, experiments are performed in the IEMOCAP dataset.
Experimental results show that the proposed technique outperforms the
state-of-the-art system by 6.5% relative improvement in terms of weighted
accuracy.
