The Construction and Testing of a Mandarin Emotional Speech Database

Researches in speech synthesis and speech analysis are underpinned by the databases they used. The performance of an emotion classifier relies heavily on the qualities of the training and testing data. A good database can make researches in these fields achieving better results. Hearing-impaired people are poor in presenting their emotions in speech. We want develop a computer-assisted speech training system that can help to teach them to present their emotions similar to normal people. In this paper, we present a way to build a Mandarin emotional database, including the process of collecting data, arranging data, clips naming rules, and a listening test. Then we construct a computer-assisted speech training system to help in teaching the hearing-impaired people presenting their emotion in their speech correctly by analyzing the emotion in their speech and those in the database using KNN and M-KNN techniques.