Estonian Emotional Speech Corpus: Culture and Age in Selecting Corpus Testers

• Authors: Rene Altrov;Hille Pajupuu
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2010 conference on Human Language Technologies -- The Baltic Perspective: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference Baltic HLT 2010
• Year: 2010

The Estonian Emotional Speech Corpus serves as the acoustic basis for emotional text-to-speech synthesis. Because the Estonian synthesizer is a TTS-synthesizer, we started off by focusing on read texts and the emotions contained in them. The corpus is built on a theoretical model and we are currently at the stage of verifying the components of the model. In the present article we give an overview of the corpus and the principles used in selecting its testers. Some studies show that people who have lived longer in a certain culture can more easily recognize vocal expressions of emotion that are characteristic of the culture without seeing the speaker's facial expressions. We therefore decided not to use people under 30 years of age as testers of emotions in our theoretical model. We used two tests to verify the selection principles for the testers. In the first test, 27 young adults aged under 30 were asked to listen to and identify the emotion (joy, anger, sadness, neutral) of 35 sentences. We then compared the results with those of adults aged over 30. In the second test we asked 32 Latvians listen to the same sentences, and then compared the results with those of Estonians. Our analysis showed that younger and older testers, Estonians and Latvians perceive emotions quite differently. From these test results we can say that the selection principle of corpus testers, using people who are more familiar with Estonian culture, is acceptable. The study was supported by the National Program for Estonian Language Technology and the project SF0050023s09 “Modeling intermodular phenomena in Estonian”.