emoUERJ: an emotional speech database in Portuguese

GOAL

Since language is a key issue in speech emotion recognition (SER) and there are few databases in Portuguese, this database was developed at the State University of Rio de Janeiro aiming to the development of specific SER models for this language.

DATABASE DESIGN

Ten sentences were made available to eight actors, equally divided between genders, and they were free to choose the phrases for record audios in four emotions target: happiness, anger, sadness or neutral. The following phrases were used:

• Não importa quem está certo. (It doesn't matter who is right.)
• Você perde tempo demais com a Internet. (You waste too much time on the Internet.)
• A garrafa está na geladeria. (The bottle is in the fridge.)
• Eu estou me sentindo doente hoje. (I'm feeling sick today)
• Eu estou um pouco atrasado. (I'm a little late)
• Nos fins de semana, eu sempre ia para a casa dele(a). (On weekends, I always used to go to his/her house)
• De quem são essas malas que estão debaixo da mesa? (Whose bags are under the table?)
• Ele volta na quarta-feira. (He comes back on wednesday)
• Já chega! Eu vou tomar um banho e ir para a cama. (Enough! I'm going to take a shower and go to bed)
• Você poderia arrumar a mesa, por favor? (Could you set the table, please?)

The result of this process was 377 audios distributed as follows

• happiness: 91
• anger: 94
• sadness: 100
• neutral: 92

FILE IDENTIFICATION

Each database file corresponds to a phrase recorded by an actor expressing one of the four emotions and was named as follows:

• Position 1: actor's gender ('m' for man or 'w' for woman)
• Positions 2 and 3: actor's id (from 01 to 04)
• Position 4: emotion (h: happiness, a: anger, s: sadness, n: neutral)
• Positions 5 and 6: recording identification

For example, the file 'w04a11' was the eleventh audio recorded by actress 04 interpreting the anger emotion.