ABSTRACT: Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) identifies and categorizes emotional states by analyzing speech signals. SER is an emerging research area using machine learning and deep learning techniques due to its socio-cultural and business importance. An appropriate dataset is an important resource for SER related studies in a particular language. There is an apparent lack of SER datasets in Bangla language although it is one of the most spoken languages in the world. There are a few Bangla SER datasets but those consist of only a few dialogs with a minimal number of actors making them unsuitable for real-world applications. Moreover, the existing datasets do not consider the intensity level of emotions. The intensity of a specific emotional expression, such as anger or sadness, plays a crucial role in social behavior. Therefore, a realistic Bangla speech dataset is developed in this study which is called KUET Bangla Emotional Speech (KBES) dataset. The dataset consists of 900 audio signals (i.e., speech dialogs) from 35 actors (20 females and 15 males) with diverse age ranges. Source of the speech dialogs are Bangla Telefilm, Drama, TV Series, Web Series. There are five emotional categories: Neutral, Happy, Sad, Angry, and Disgust. Except Neutral, samples of a particular emotion are divided into two intensity levels: Low and High. The significant issue of the dataset is that the speech dialogs are almost unique with relatively large number of actors; whereas, existing datasets (such as SUBESCO and BanglaSER) contain samples with repeatedly spoken of a few pre-defined dialogs by a few actors/research volunteers in the laboratory environment. Finally, the KBES dataset is exposed as a nine-class problem to classify emotions into nine categories: Neutral, Happy (Low), Happy (High), Sad (Low), Sad (High), Angry (Low), Angry (High), Disgust (Low) and Disgust (High). However, the dataset is kept symmetrical containing 100 samples for each of the nine classes; 100 samples are also gender balanced with 50 samples for male/female actors. The developed dataset seems a realistic dataset while compared with the existing SER datasets.
