VOCE corpus: Ecologically collected speech annotated with physiological and psychological stress assessments

Abstract

Public speaking is a widely requested professional skill, and at the same time an activity that causes one of the most common adult phobias (Miller and Stone, 2009). It is also known that the study of stress under laboratory conditions, as it is most commonly done, may provide only limited ecological validity (Wilhelm and Grossman, 2010). Previously, we introduced an inter-disciplinary methodology to enable collecting a large amount of recordings under consistent conditions (Aguiar et al., 2013). This paper introduces the VOCE corpus of speech annotated with stress indicators under naturalistic public speaking (PS) settings. The novelty of this corpus is that the recordings are carried out in objectively stressful PS situations, as recommended in (Zanstra and Johnston, 2011). The current database contains a total of 38 recordings, 13 of which contain full psychologic and physiologic annotation. We show that the collected recordings validate the assumptions of the methodology, namely that participants experience stress during the PS events. We describe the various metrics that can be used for physiologic and psychologic annotation, and we characterise the sample collected so far, providing evidence that demographics do not affect the relevant psychologic or physiologic annotation. The collection activities are on-going, and we expect to increase the number of complete recordings in the corpus to 30 by June 2014.