The Kiel Corpora of "Speech & Emotion" - A Summary

It is not long ago that research on speech communication
was solely concerned with basic structural issues of allophonic
variation, tune grammar, and boundary signals. Many
issues are still far from being fully understood, even for
Western European languages, but we have gained enough
knowledge to start digging deeper into the social and interactional
aspects of speech that actually drive communication
and are coded in complex segmental and prosodic details.
This shift in research focus manifests itself also in speech
corpora and is undoubtedly boosted by the rapidly growing
number of speech technology applications that sneak in
every corner of our life. Apart from the fact that speech corpora
seem to become constantly larger (for example, in order
to properly train self-learning speech synthesis/recognition
algorithms), the content of speech corpora also changes. In
particular, recordings of isolated logatomes, words or sentences
are successively supplanted by more realistic, interactive,
and informal speech-production tasks.