The development of the Athens Emotional States Inventory (AESI): collection, validation and automatic processing of emotionally loaded sentences.

Objectives: The development of ecologically valid procedures for collecting reliable and unbiased emotional data towards computer interfaces with social and affective intelligence targeting patients with mental disorders.

Methods: Following its development, presented with, the Athens Emotional States Inventory (AESI) proposes the design, recording and validation of an audiovisual database for five emotional states: anger, fear, joy, sadness and neutral. The items of the AESI consist of sentences each having content indicative of the corresponding emotion. Emotional content was assessed through a survey of 40 young participants with a questionnaire following the Latin square design. The emotional sentences that were correctly identified by 85% of the participants were recorded in a soundproof room with microphones and cameras. A preliminary validation of AESI is performed through automatic emotion recognition experiments from speech.

Results: The resulting database contains 696 recorded utterances in Greek language by 20 native speakers and has a total duration of approximately 28 min. Speech classification results yield accuracy up to 75.15% for automatically recognizing the emotions in AESI.

Conclusions: These results indicate the usefulness of our approach for collecting emotional data with reliable content, balanced across classes and with reduced environmental variability.