Robust Speech Emotion Recognition under Tone-Word Conflict: A Benchmark and Framework

Abstract

Speech emotion recognition (SER) is a crucial component of human-computer interaction, attracting extensive attention from both industry and academia. However, existing SER systems typically assume alignment between vocal tone and lexical semantics, overlooking the real-world scenarios that involve tone-word conflict-where the emotion conveyed by speech contradicts the literal meaning of the words. To bridge this gap, we introduce TWIN-SER (Tone-Word Incongruent SER), a benchmark for systematic evaluation under acoustic-semantic incongruence, and show that state-of-the-art models degrade severely under such incongruence. To address this, we propose DAS (Disentangled Acoustic-Semantic fusion), a framework that mitigates tone-word conflict by explicitly disentangling acoustic and semantic pathways, selecting informative high-energy embeddings, and adaptively fusing them via a lightweight query-based attention mechanism. Specifically, DAS comprises three crucial modules: i) a heterogeneous feature extraction module that separately captures complementary acoustic and semantic representations from raw input; ii) a high-energy embedding selection module that identifies and retains the most discriminative embeddings; and iii) a Q-Former combination module that bridges the two pathways through cross-attention, enabling robust emotion prediction under incongruent conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DAS consistently outperforms existing methods in tone-word conflict scenarios, as well as in standard in-domain and zero-shot settings. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/24DavidHuang/FAS