Title
MSP-IMPROV: An Acted Corpus of Dyadic Interactions to Study Emotion Perception.
Abstract
We present the MSP-IMPROV corpus, a multimodal emotional database, where the goal is to have control over lexical content and emotion while also promoting naturalness in the recordings. Studies on emotion perception often require stimuli with fixed lexical content, but that convey different emotions. These stimuli can also serve as an instrument to understand how emotion modulates speech at the phoneme level, in a manner that controls for coarticulation. Such audiovisual data are not easily available from natural recordings. A common solution is to record actors reading sentences that portray different emotions, which may not produce natural behaviors. We propose an alternative approach in which we define hypothetical scenarios for each sentence that are carefully designed to elicit a particular emotion. Two actors improvise these emotion-specific situations, leading them to utter contextualized, non-read renditions of sentences that have fixed lexical content and convey different emotions. We describe the context in which this corpus was recorded, the key features of the corpus, the areas in which this corpus can be useful, and the emotional content of the recordings. The paper also provides the performance for speech and facial emotion classifiers. The analysis brings novel classification evaluations where we study the performance in terms of inter-evaluator agreement and naturalness perception, leveraging the large size of the audiovisual database.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1109/TAFFC.2016.2515617
IEEE Trans. Affective Computing
Keywords
Field
DocType
Databases,Speech,Affective computing,Context,Videos,Emotion recognition,Computer science
Naturalness,Psychology,Emotion perception,Coarticulation,Natural language processing,Artificial intelligence,Affective science,Stimulus (physiology),Affective computing,Perception,Sentence
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
8
1
1949-3045
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
24
0.79
46
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Carlos Busso1161693.04
S. Parthasarthy2605.25
Alec Burmania3441.88
Mohammed Abdel-Wahab4493.35
Najmeh Sadoughi5587.48
Emily Mower6106259.08