IESC-Child: An Interactive Emotional Children’s Speech Corpus

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the process that we used to create a new corpus of children’s emotional speech. We used a Wizard of Oz (WoZ) setting to induce different emotional reactions in children during speech-based interactions with two robots. We recorded the speech spoken in Mexican Spanish by 174 children (both sexes) between 6 and 11 years of age. The recordings were manually segmented and transcribed. The segments were then labeled with two types of emotional-related paralinguistic information: emotion and attitude. The corpus contained 2093 min of audio recordings (34.88 h) divided into 19,793 speech segments. The Interactive Emotional Children’s Speech Corpus (IESC-Child) can be a valuable resource for researchers studying affective reactions in speech communication during child-computer interactions in Spanish and for creating models to recognize acoustic paralinguistic information. IESC-Child is available to the research community upon request.