@inproceedings{wong-etal-2026-unrequited,
    title = "Unrequited Emotions: Investigating the Gaps in Motivation and Practice in Speech Emotion Recognition Research",
    author = "Wong, Taryn  and
      Talat, Zeerak  and
      Aldarmaki, Hanan  and
      Field, Anjalie",
    editor = "Bagdon, Christopher  and
      Vishnubhotla, Krishnapriya  and
      Lindquist, Kristen A.  and
      Ungar, Lyle  and
      Klinger, Roman  and
      Mohammad, Saif M.",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of Computational Affective Science ({CAS}) @ {LREC} 2026",
    month = may,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Palma, Mallorca (Spain)",
    publisher = "ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/revision-previews/2026.cas-1.6/",
    doi = "10.63317/42e4sre4izeu",
    pages = "57--73",
    abstract = "Critical analyses of emotion recognition technology have raised ethical concerns around task validity and potential downstream impacts, urging researchers to ensure alignment between their stated motivations and practice. However, these discussions have not adequately influenced or drawn from research on speech emotion recognition (SER). We address this gap by conducting a systematic survey of SER research to uncover what stated motivations drive this work and if they align with the datasets and emotions studied. We find that while SER research identifies appealing goals{---}such as well-situated voice-activated systems or healthcare applications{---}commonly-used datasets do not reflect these proposed deployment contexts, thus presenting a gap between motivations and research practices. We argue that such gaps engender ethical concerns, and that SER research should reassert itself with concrete use-cases to prevent misinterpretations, misuse, and downstream harms."
}