Belfast Naturalistic Database An Overview

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

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

Use of BND within HUMAINE Copyright problems but available under certain conditions To be used in developing labelling schemes –of emotion –and of higher order signs To be used in conjunction with CNRS EmoTV database for cross cultural comparisons of naturalistic data