EMOVO Corpus: an Italian Emotional Speech Database

Giovanni Costantini, Iacopo Iaderola, Andrea Paoloni, Massimiliano Todisco


Abstract
This article describes the first emotional corpus, named EMOVO, applicable to Italian language,. It is a database built from the voices of up to 6 actors who played 14 sentences simulating 6 emotional states (disgust, fear, anger, joy, surprise, sadness) plus the neutral state. These emotions are the well-known Big Six found in most of the literature related to emotional speech. The recordings were made with professional equipment in the Fondazione Ugo Bordoni laboratories. The paper also describes a subjective validation test of the corpus, based on emotion-discrimination of two sentences carried out by two different groups of 24 listeners. The test was successful because it yielded an overall recognition accuracy of 80%. It is observed that emotions less easy to recognize are joy and disgust, whereas the most easy to detect are anger, sadness and the neutral state.
Anthology ID:
L14-1478
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
3501–3504
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/591_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Giovanni Costantini, Iacopo Iaderola, Andrea Paoloni, and Massimiliano Todisco. 2014. EMOVO Corpus: an Italian Emotional Speech Database. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 3501–3504, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
EMOVO Corpus: an Italian Emotional Speech Database (Costantini et al., LREC 2014)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/591_Paper.pdf