DementiaBank-Emotion: A Multi-Rater Emotion Annotation Corpus for Alzheimer's Disease Speech (Version 1.0)

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Authors: Cheonkam Jeong, Jessica Liao, Audrey Lu, Yutong Song, Christopher Rashidian, Donna Krogh, Erik Krogh, Mahkameh Rasouli, Jung-Ah Lee, Nikil Dutt, Lisa Gibbs, David L. Sultzer
+7 more Julie Rousseau, Jocelyn Ludlow, Margaret Galvez, Alexander Nuth, Chet Khay, Sabine Brunswicker, Adeline Nyamathi
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Abstract

We present DementiaBank-Emotion, the first multi-rater emotion annotation corpus for Alzheimer's disease (AD) speech. Annotating 1,492 utterances from 108 speakers for Ekman's six basic emotions and neutral, we find that AD patients express significantly more non-neutral emotions (16.9%) than healthy controls (5.7%; p < .001). Exploratory acoustic analysis suggests a possible dissociation: control speakers showed substantial F0 modulation for sadness (Delta = -3.45 semitones from baseline), whereas AD speakers showed minimal change (Delta = +0.11 semitones; interaction p = .023), though this finding is based on limited samples (sadness: n=5 control, n=15 AD) and requires replication. Within AD speech, loudness differentiates emotion categories, indicating partially preserved emotion-prosody mappings. We release the corpus, annotation guidelines, and calibration workshop materials to support research on emotion recognition in clinical populations.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Emotion and Mood Recognition Dementia and Cognitive Impairment Research Linguistic Studies and Language Acquisition

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
4 February 2026
Document type
Preprint