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).
The text material consisted of 10 TIMIT sentences per emotion, giving a total of 60 TIMIT sentences, such that: 3 common that were the same for each emotion, 2 emotion-specific and 5 generic sentences that were different for each emotion. The 3 common and 2 x 6 = 12 emotion-specific sentences were recorded as neutral in addition to 2 neutral sentences and 3 generic sentences. This gives a total of 20 neutral sentences. Therefore, a total of 80 utterances per speaker is recorded.
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. Please refer to this article: Alhinti, L., Cunningham, S., & Christensen, H. (in press). The Dysarthric Expressed Emotional Database(DEED): An Audio-Visual database in British English that 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 is freely available for research purposes under a Creative Commons licence. To gain access to the database, please send an email to the following address: dysarthricdeed@gmail.com
The DEED database was recorded as part of an investigation into dysarthric speech emotion classification, from which the following articles have been published:
Alhinti, L., Cunningham, S., & Christensen, H. (accepted). The Dysarthric Expressed Emotional Database(DEED): An Audio-Visual database in British English, PLOS One