Cross-corpus acoustic emotion recognition: Variances and strategies (Extended abstract)

As the recognition of emotion from speech has matured to a degree where it becomes applicable in real-life settings, it is time for a realistic view on obtainable performances. Most studies tend to overestimation in this respect: acted data is often used rather than spontaneous data, results are reported on pre-selected prototypical data, and true speaker disjunctive partitioning is still less common than simple cross-validation. A considerably more realistic impression can be gathered by inter-set evaluation: we therefore show results employing six standard databases in a cross-corpora evaluation experiment. To better cope with the observed high variances, different types of normalization are investigated. 1.8 k individual evaluations in total indicate the crucial performance inferiority of inter- to intra-corpus testing.