Attention guided learnable time-domain filterbanks for speech depression detection

Depression, as a global mental health problem, is lacking effective screening methods that can help with early detection and treatment. This paper aims to facilitate the large-scale screening of depression by focusing on the speech depression detection (SDD) task. Currently, direct modeling on the raw signal yields a large number of parameters, and the existing deep learning-based SDD models mainly use the fixed Mel-scale spectral features as input. However, these features are not designed for depression detection, and the manual settings limit the exploration of fine-grained feature representations. In this paper, we learn the effective representations of the raw signals from an interpretable perspective. Specifically, we present a joint learning framework with attention-guided learnable time-domain filterbanks for depression classification (DALF), which collaborates with the depression filterbanks features learning (DFBL) module and multi-scale spectral attention learning (MSSA) module. DFBL is capable of producing biologically meaningful acoustic features by employing learnable time-domain filters, and MSSA is used to guide the learnable filters to better retain the useful frequency sub-bands. We collect a new dataset, the Neutral Reading-based Audio Corpus (NRAC), to facilitate the research in depression analysis, and we evaluate the performance of DALF on the NRAC and the public DAIC-woz datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art SDD methods with an F1 of 78.4% on the DAIC-woz dataset. In particular, DALF achieves F1 scores of 87.3% and 81.7% on two parts of the NRAC dataset. By analyzing the filter coefficients, we find that the most important frequency range identified by our method is 600-700Hz, which corresponds to the Mandarin vowels /e/ and /eˆ/ and can be considered as an effective biomarker for the SDD task. Taken together, our DALF model provides a promising approach to depression detection.