VESUS: A Crowd-Annotated Database to Study Emotion Production and Perception in Spoken English
Abstract
We introduce the Varied Emotion in Syntactically Uniform Speech (VESUS) repository as a new resource for the speech community. VESUS is a lexically controlled database, in which a semantically neutral script is portrayed with different emotional inflections. In total, VESUS contains over 250 distinct phrases, each read by ten actors in five emotional states. We use crowd sourcing to obtain ten human ratings for the perceived emotional content of each utterance. Our unique database construction enables a multitude of scientific and technical explorations. To jumpstart this effort, we provide benchmark performance on three distinct emotion recognition tasks using VESUS: longitudinal speaker analysis, extrapolating across syntactical complexity, and generalization to a new speaker.