Paralingua – A New Speech Corpus for the Studies of Paralinguistic Features

This paper introduces “Paralingua” - a new speech corpus created within a larger ongoing project whose primary aim was to develop a speaker recognition and identification system for forensics. The present corpus was designed for the purpose of analysis of selected paralinguistic features in continuous speech and for preliminary examination of the vocal display of affective states. The recorded (and annotated) data include conversational speech in the form of task-oriented dialogues, emotional utterances (realized as emotion portrayals), and an acted court scene. As a reference material, a short read text was provided by each of the speakers.