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Developing a Thai emotional speech corpus from Lakorn (EMOLA)

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Abstract

Advances in emotional speech recognition and synthesis essentially rely on the availability of annotated emotional speech corpora. As a low resource language, the Thai language critically lacks corpora of emotional speech, although a few corpora have been constructed for speech recognition and synthesis. This paper presents the design of a Thai emotional speech corpus (namely EMOLA), its construction and annotation process, and its analysis. In the corpus design, four basic types with twelve subtypes of emotions are defined with consideration of the Pleasure-Arousal-Dominance emotional state model. To construct the corpus, a series of Thai dramas (1397 min) were selected and its video clips of approximately 868 min were annotated. As a result, 8987 transcriptions (of conversation turns) were derived in total, with each transcription tagged as one basic type and a few subtypes. Finally, an analysis was conducted to describe the characteristics of this corpus in three sets of statistics: collection-level, annotator-oriented and actor-oriented statistics.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by a SIIT graduate student scholarship, the Center of Excellence in Intelligent Informatics, Speech and Language Technology and Service Innovation (CILS), Thammasat University, the Center of Excellence in Intelligent Informatics and Service Innovation (IISI), SIIT, Thammasat University, and the Thailand Research Fund under the Grant Number RTA6080013.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information, Computer and Communication Technologies, Sirindhorn International Institute of Technology, Thammasat University, 99 Phaholyothin Road, Khlong Luang, Pathumthani, 12120, Thailand

    Sawit Kasuriya & Piyawat Sukhummek

  2. School of Information, Computer and Communication Technologies, Sirindhorn International Institute of Technology, Thammasat University, 99 Moo 18 Paholyothin Road, Klong Luang, Rangsit, Pathumthani, 12121, Thailand

    Thanaruk Theeramunkong

  3. National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC), 112 Phahonyothin Road, Khlong Nueng, Khlong Luang District, Pathumthani, 12120, Thailand

    Chai Wutiwiwatchai

  4. Academy of Science, Royal Society of Thailand, Sanam Sueapa, Khet Dusit, Bangkok, 10300, Thailand

    Thanaruk Theeramunkong

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  1. Sawit Kasuriya
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Kasuriya, S., Theeramunkong, T., Wutiwiwatchai, C. et al. Developing a Thai emotional speech corpus from Lakorn (EMOLA). Lang Resources & Evaluation 53, 17–55 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-018-9428-9

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