The Vera am Mittag German audio-visual emotional speech database

The lack of publicly available annotated databases is one of the major barriers to research advances on emotional information processing. In this contribution we present a recently collected database of spontaneous emotional speech in German which is being made available to the research community. The database consists of 12 hours of audio-visual recordings of the German TV talk show ldquoVera am Mittagrdquo, segmented into broadcasts, dialogue acts and utterances. This corpus contains spontaneous and very emotional speech recorded from unscripted, authentic discussions between the guests of the talk show. In addition to the audio-visual data and the segmented utterances we provide emotion labels for a great part of the data. The emotion labels are given on a continuous valued scale for three emotion primitives: valence, activation and dominance, using a large number of human evaluators. Such data is of great interest to all research groups working on spontaneous speech analysis, emotion recognition in both speech and facial expression, natural language understanding, and robust speech recognition.