EMOGIB: Emotional gibberish speech database for affective human-robot interaction

Abstract

Gibberish speech consists of vocalizations of meaningless strings of speech sounds. It is sometimes used by performing artists or by cartoon animations (e.g.: Teletubbies) to express intended emotions, without pronouncing any actually understandable word. The facts that no understandable text has to be pronounced and that only affect is conveyed create the advantage of gibberish in affective computing. In our study, we intend to experiment the communication between a robot and hospitalized children using affective gibberish. In this study, a new emotional database consisting of 4 distinct corpuses has been recorded for the purpose of affective child-robot interaction. The database comprises speech recordings of one actress simulating a neutral state and the big six emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise. The database has been evaluated through a perceptual test for all subsets of the database by adults and one subset of the database with children, achieving recognition scores up to 81%. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.