1. Belfast Naturalistic Database
Leaders
Ellen Douglas-Cowie and Edelle McMahon

2. Some factual information about BND
Audiovisual
Naturalistic/real life
127 speakers
298 ‘ emotional clips’
1 relatively neutral + at least 1 emotional state
Clips span secs and are contextualised
Extracted from television chat shows, recording sessions with friends
Distribution of clips across wide emotional space – active, passive, positive, negative
Labelled for emotion using Feeltrace + categorical system
ASSESS applied to speech

3. Core Aims of Database
To be the first large audiovisual naturalistic database of emotion
To collect examples of ‘bounded emotions’ – states that contrast with normal mainly rational state
To seek out the most emotionally intense examples, with the expectation of finding discrete, ‘pure’ emotions
To cover a wide range of emotions

4. Aims versus the reality
Emotion in real life is not always bounded, or discrete or pure
Emotion can be pervasive rather than discrete, and actions and interactions can be emotionally ‘coloured’ in quite complex ways
Signs of emotion not always what we had expected
In practical terms naturalistic data is messy as a basis for machine training – overlapping voices, extreme movement, hiding of face, background noise etc

5. Aims of practical
To show how emotion in real life goes beyond our original stereotypes of bounded emotions
To highlight the practical problems of using ‘real’ data for machine training
To use the naturalistic database as a basis for thinking about frameworks for the collection and description of emotion

6. Format of practical Demonstration/Exercise 1 (Group work)
Examples of the range and form of emotion in real life as provided by the BND
Demonstration/Exercise 2 (Individual work followed by group discussion)
Examples which show the problems in identifying the emotion in real life data
Demonstration/Exercise 3 (Individual work followed by group discussion)
The nature of emotion from different sources: stimulus present, recall, semi performance, acted