EMOVO Corpus: an Italian Emotional Speech Database
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2014)
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.