A speech corpus of Quechua Collao for automatic dimensional emotion recognition

Abstract

Automatic speech emotion recognition is an important research topic for human-computer interaction and affective computing. Over ten million people speak the Quechua language throughout South America, and one of the most known variants is the Quechua Collao one. However, this language can be considered a low resource for machine emotion recognition, creating a barrier for Quechua speakers who want to use this technology. Therefore, the contribution of this work is a 15 hours speech corpus in Quechua Collao, which is made publicly available to the research community. The corpus was created from a set of words and sentences explicitly collected for this task, divided into nine categorical emotions: happy, sad, bored, fear, sleepy, calm, excited, angry, and neutral. The annotation was performed on a 5-value discrete scale according to 3 dimensions: valence, arousal, and dominance. To demonstrate the usefulness of the corpus, we have performed speech emotion recognition using machine learning methods and neural networks.