The Varied Emotion in Syntactically Uniform Speech (VESUS) repository is a lexically controlled database collected by the NSA lab. Here, actors read a semantically neutral script of words, phrases, and sentences with different emotional inflections. VESUS contains 252 distinct phrases, each read by 10 actors in 5 emotional states (neutral, angry, happy, sad, fearful). The script can be downloaded by filling out this form.
VESUS obtain 10 crowd-sourced ratings for each utterance to determine the perceived emotion across a general population. In total, VESUS contains over 6 hours of pure speech and over 10,000 emotional annotations.
Phonetic comparison of our script (blue) with the 3,000 most commonly used words in spoken English (red). Bins corresponds to one of the 44 English phonemes. The y-axis indicates the frequency of occurrence. The VESUS script is phonetically balanced.
Release
VESUS will be made freely available for academic use. To gain access to the database, fill out this form. You will be provided a download link once we have received your information. Additionally, please cite the following paper in any work that uses VESUS:
J. Sager, R. Shankar, J. Reinhold, and A. Venkataraman.VESUS: A Crowd-Annotated Database to Study Emotion Production and Perception in Spoken English.In Proc. Interspeech: Conf of the Intl Speech Communication Association, pp. 316-320, 2019.