The Dysarthric Expressed Emotional Database (DEED): An audio-visual database in British English

by Lubna Alhinti, Stuart Cunningham, Heidi Christensen

The Dysarthric Expressed Emotional Database (DEED) is a novel, parallel multimodal (audio-visual) database of dysarthric and typical emotional speech in British English which is a first of its kind. It is an induced (elicited) emotional database that includes speech recorded in the six basic emotions: “happiness”, “sadness”, “anger”, “surprise”, “fear”, and “disgust”. A “neutral” state has also been recorded as a baseline condition. The dysarthric speech part includes recordings from 4 speakers: one female speaker with dysarthria due to cerebral palsy and 3 speakers with dysarthria due to Parkinson’s disease (2 female and 1 male). The typical speech part includes recordings from 21 typical speakers (9 female and 12 male). This paper describes the collection of the database, covering its design, development, technical information related to the data capture, and description of the data files and presents the validation methodology. The database was validated subjectively (human performance) and objectively (automatic recognition). The achieved results demonstrated that this database will be a valuable resource for understanding emotion communication by people with dysarthria and useful in the research field of dysarthric emotion classification. The database is freely available for research purposes under a Creative Commons licence at: https://sites.google.com/sheffield.ac.uk/deed