On the Emotion Understanding of Synthesized Speech
Yuan Ge, Haishu Zhao Northeastern University, AoKai Hao Northeastern University, Junxiang Zhang, Bei Li Meituan, Xiaoqian Liu Northeastern University, Chenglong Wang Northeastern University, Jianjin Wang 等 13 位作者
Emotion is a core paralinguistic feature in voice interaction. It is widely believed that emotion understanding models learn fundamental representations that transfer to synthesized speech, making emotion understanding results a plausible reward or evaluation metric for assessing emotional expressiveness in speech synthesis. In this work, we critically examine this assumption by systematically evaluating Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) on synthesized speech across datasets, discriminative and generative SER models, and diverse synthesis models. We find that current SER models can not generalize to synthesized speech, largely because speech token prediction during synthesis induces a representation mismatch between synthesized and human speech. Moreover, generative Speech Language Models (SLMs) tend to infer emotion from textual semantics while ignoring paralinguistic cues. Overall, our findings suggest that existing SER models often exploit non-robust shortcuts rather than capturing fundamental features, and paralinguistic understanding in SLMs remains challenging.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表