Belfast Naturalistic Database Leaders Ellen Douglas-Cowie and Edelle McMahon

Some factual information about BND Audiovisual Naturalistic/real life 127 speakers 298 ‘ emotional clips’ 1 relatively neutral + at least 1 emotional state Clips span 10-60 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

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

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

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

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