Advancing Low-Resource Urdu Speech Emotion Recognition: Employing Deep Learning with Unidirectional and Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Units on Mel-Spectrogram Acoustic Features

In the growing field of artificial intelligence, identifying emotions in Urdu speech presents distinct challenges. This work adopts a novel approach using unidirectional (Uni-GRU) and bidirectional (Bi-GRU) gated recurrent units to examine the acoustic characteristics of the Mel-spectrogram for emotion classification. We propose a speech emotion recognition (SER) method based on these specific recurrent neural network architectures. Initially, the Uni-GRU model processed the Melspectrogram and effectively captured emotional patterns in URDU dataset samples, achieving 98.33% training accuracy, <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">${7 5. 0 0 \%}$</tex> validation accuracy, and <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">${8 1. 2 5 \%}$</tex> testing accuracy. Subsequently, the enhanced Bi-GRU model surpassed the Uni-GRU by more accurately identifying complex emotions, attaining a training accuracy of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">${9 8. 7 5 \%}$</tex>, validation accuracy of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">${7 8. 7 5 \%}$</tex>, and testing accuracy of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">${8 7. 5 0 \%}$</tex>. Our evaluation on a representative Urdu corpus shows that GRU-based models substantially improve SER performance. This modeling strategy highlights the advantages of using Uni-GRU and Bi-GRU architectures with Mel-spectrogram features, offering insights into emotion recognition in low-resource languages. The findings demonstrate the potential of deep learning to support speech processing in underrepresented linguistic contexts and lay the groundwork for extending SER applications across a broader range of language environments.