title: Automatic discrimination of emotion from spoken Finnish.
abstract: In this paper, experiments on the automatic discrimination of basic emotions from spoken Finnish are described. For the purpose of the study, a large emotional speech corpus of Finnish was collected; 14 professional actors acted as speakers, and simulated four primary emotions when reading out a semantically neutral text. More than 40 prosodic features were derived and automatically computed from the speech samples. Two application scenarios were tested: the first scenario was speaker-independent for a small domain of speakers while the second scenario was completely speaker-independent. Human listening experiments were conducted to assess the perceptual adequacy of the emotional speech samples. Statistical classification experiments indicated that, with the optimal combination of prosodic feature vectors, automatic emotion discrimination performance close to human emotion recognition ability was achievable.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, Information Processing Laboratory, P.O. BOX 4500, FIN-90014, University of Oulu, Finland. juhani.toivanen@ee.oulu.fi
authors.forename: Juhani
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Toivanen
authors.forename: Eero
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Väyrynen
authors.forename: Tapio
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Seppänen
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012938:Social Perception; D013067:Speech Perception