nEMO: Dataset of Emotional Speech in Polish
This addresses a research gap for Slavic languages in speech emotion recognition, which is incremental as it provides a new dataset for an existing problem.
The paper tackles the lack of emotional speech datasets for Slavic languages by developing nEMO, a corpus of over 3 hours of Polish speech samples portraying six emotional states, recorded with nine actors and made freely available under a Creative Commons license.
Speech emotion recognition has become increasingly important in recent years due to its potential applications in healthcare, customer service, and personalization of dialogue systems. However, a major issue in this field is the lack of datasets that adequately represent basic emotional states across various language families. As datasets covering Slavic languages are rare, there is a need to address this research gap. This paper presents the development of nEMO, a novel corpus of emotional speech in Polish. The dataset comprises over 3 hours of samples recorded with the participation of nine actors portraying six emotional states: anger, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, and a neutral state. The text material used was carefully selected to represent the phonetics of the Polish language adequately. The corpus is freely available under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).