Abstract

Research on human emotional behavior, and the development of automatic emotion recognition and animation systems, rely heavily on appropriate audio-visual databases of expressive human speech, language, gestures and postures. The use of actors to record emotional databases has been a popular approach in the study of emotions. Recently, this method has been criticized since the emotional content expressed by the actors seems to differ from the emotions observed in real-life scenarios. However, a deeper look at the current settings used in the recording of the existing corpora reveals that a key problem may not be the use of actors itself, but the ad-hoc elicitation method used in the recording. This paper discusses the main limitations of the current settings used in collecting acted emotional databases, and suggests guidelines for the design of new corpora recorded from actors that may reduce the gap observed between the laboratory condition and real-life applications. As a case study, the paper discusses the interactive emotional dyadic motion capture database (IEMOCAP), recently recorded at the University of Southern California (USC), which inspired the suggested guidelines.

Date

May 26, 2008

Authors

Carlos Busso, Shrikanth Narayanan

Journal

Second international workshop on emotion: corpora for research on emotion and affect, international conference on language resources and evaluation (LREC 2008)

Pages

17-22