  Speech emotion recognition is a challenging task, and extensive reliance has
been placed on models that use audio features in building well-performing
classifiers. In this paper, we propose a novel deep dual recurrent encoder
model that utilizes text data and audio signals simultaneously to obtain a
better understanding of speech data. As emotional dialogue is composed of sound
and spoken content, our model encodes the information from audio and text
sequences using dual recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and then combines the
information from these sources to predict the emotion class. This architecture
analyzes speech data from the signal level to the language level, and it thus
utilizes the information within the data more comprehensively than models that
focus on audio features. Extensive experiments are conducted to investigate the
efficacy and properties of the proposed model. Our proposed model outperforms
previous state-of-the-art methods in assigning data to one of four emotion
categories (i.e., angry, happy, sad and neutral) when the model is applied to
the IEMOCAP dataset, as reflected by accuracies ranging from 68.8% to 71.8%.
