Support vector machines (SVMs) are utilized for emotion recognition in Chinese speech in this paper. Both binary class discrimination and the multi class discrimination are discussed. It proves that the emotional features construct a nonlinear problem in the input space, and SVMs based on nonlinear mapping can solve it more effectively than other linear methods. Multi class classification based on SVMs with a soft decision function is constructed to classify the four emotion situations. Compared with principal component analysis (PCA) method and modified PCA method, SVMs perform the best result in multi class discrimination by using nonlinear kernel mapping.
