VOCE Corpus: Ecologically Collected Speech Annotated with Physiological and Psychological Stress Assessments
Aguiar, A.
; Kaiseler, M.
; Silva, J. S.
; Meinedo, H.
; Almeida, P. Almeida
; Julião, M. D.
VOCE Corpus: Ecologically Collected Speech Annotated with Physiological and Psychological Stress Assessments, Proc ELRA International Conf. on Language Resources and Evaluation, - LREC, Reykjavik, Iceland, Vol. 978-2-9517408-8-4, pp. 1 - 6, May, 2014.
Digital Object Identifier: 978-2-9517408-8-4
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Abstract
Public speaking is a widely requested professional skill, and at the same time an activity that causes one of the most common adult
phobias (Miller and Stone, 2009). It is also known that the study of stress under laboratory conditions, as it is most commonly done, may
provide only limited ecological validity (Wilhelm and Grossman, 2010). Previously, we introduced an inter-disciplinary methodology
to enable collecting a large amount of recordings under consistent conditions (Aguiar et al., 2013). This paper introduces the VOCE
corpus of speech annotated with stress indicators under naturalistic public speaking (PS) settings. The novelty of this corpus is that the
recordings are carried out in objectively stressful PS situations, as recommended in (Zanstra and Johnston, 2011). The current database
contains a total of 38 recordings, 13 of which contain full psychologic and physiologic annotation. We show that the collected recordings
validate the assumptions of the methodology, namely that participants experience stress during the PS events. We describe the various
metrics that can be used for physiologic and psychologic annotation, and we characterise the sample collected so far, providing evidence
that demographics do not affect the relevant psychologic or physiologic annotation. The collection activities are on-going, and we expect
to increase the number of complete recordings in the corpus to 30 by June 2014.