The Next Generation of Edutainment Applications for Young Children—A Proposal

Automatic Speech Emotion Recognition of Younger School Age Children

This paper introduces the extended description of a database that contains emotional speech in the Russian language of younger school age (8–12-year-old) children and describes the results of validation of the database based on classical machine learning algorithms, such as Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP). The validation is performed using standard procedures and scenarios of the validation similar to other well-known databases of children’s emotional acting speech. Performance evaluation of automatic multiclass recognition on four emotion classes “Neutral (Calm)—Joy—Sadness—Anger” shows the superiority of SVM performance and also MLP performance over the results of perceptual tests. Moreover, the results of automatic recognition on the test dataset which was used in the perceptual test are even better. These results prove that emotions in the database can be reliably recognized both by experts and automatically using classical machine learning algorithms such as SVM and MLP, which can be used as baselines for comparing emotion recognition systems based on more sophisticated modern machine learning methods and deep neural networks. The results also confirm that this database can be a valuable resource for researchers studying affective reactions in speech communication during child-computer interactions in the Russian language and can be used to develop various edutainment, health care, etc. applications.