EmoChildRu: Emotional child Russian speech corpus

Elena Lyakso*, Olga Frolova, Evgeniya Dmitrieva, Aleksey Grigorev, Heysem Kaya, Albert Ali Salah, Alexey Karpov

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

We present the first child emotional speech corpus in Russian, called “EmoChildRu”, which contains audio materials of 3–7 year old kids. The database includes over 20K recordings (approx. 30 h), collected from 100 children. Recordings were carried out in three controlled settings by creating different emotional states for children: playing with a standard set of toys; repetition of words from a toy-parrot in a game store setting; watching a cartoon and retelling of the story, respectively. This corpus is designed to study the reflection of the emotional state in the characteristics of voice and speech and for studies of the formation of emotional states in ontogenesis. A portion of the corpus is annotated for three emotional states (discomfort, neutral, comfort). Additional data include brain activity measurements (original EEG, evoked potentials records), the results of the adult listeners analysis of child speech, questionnaires, and description of dialogues. The paper reports two child emotional speech analysis experiments on the corpus: by adult listeners (humans) and by an automatic classifier (machine), respectively. Automatic classification results are very similar to human perception, although the accuracy is below 55% for both, showing the difficulty of child emotion recognition from speech under naturalistic conditions.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSpeech and Computer - 17th International Conference, SPECOM 2015, Proceedings
EditorsAndrey Ronzhin, Rodmonga Potapova, Nikos Fakotakis
PublisherSpringer
Pages144-152
Number of pages9
ISBN (Print)9783319231310
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2015
Event17th International Conference on Speech and Computer, SPECOM 2015 - Athens, Greece
Duration: 20 Sept 201524 Sept 2015

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume9319
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference17th International Conference on Speech and Computer, SPECOM 2015
Country/TerritoryGreece
CityAthens
Period20/09/1524/09/15

Keywords

  • Computational paralinguistics
  • Emotional child speech
  • Emotional states
  • Perceptual analysis
  • Spectrographic analysis

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