  Data augmentation is a widely used strategy for training robust machine
learning models. It partially alleviates the problem of limited data for tasks
like speech emotion recognition (SER), where collecting data is expensive and
challenging. This study proposes CopyPaste, a perceptually motivated novel
augmentation procedure for SER. Assuming that the presence of emotions other
than neutral dictates a speaker's overall perceived emotion in a recording,
concatenation of an emotional (emotion E) and a neutral utterance can still be
labeled with emotion E. We hypothesize that SER performance can be improved
using these concatenated utterances in model training. To verify this, three
CopyPaste schemes are tested on two deep learning models: one trained
independently and another using transfer learning from an x-vector model, a
speaker recognition model. We observed that all three CopyPaste schemes improve
SER performance on all the three datasets considered: MSP-Podcast, Crema-D, and
IEMOCAP. Additionally, CopyPaste performs better than noise augmentation and,
using them together improves the SER performance further. Our experiments on
noisy test sets suggested that CopyPaste is effective even in noisy test
conditions.
