This paper presents the validation of the expressive content of an acted corpus produced to be used in speech synthesis. The
use of acted speech can be rather lacking in authenticity and therefore its expressiveness validation is required. The goal
is to obtain an automatic classifier able to prune the bad utterances –with wrong expressiveness–. Firstly, a subjective test
has been conducted with almost ten percent of the corpus utterances. Secondly, objective techniques have been carried out
by means of automatic identification of emotions using different algorithms applied to statistical features computed over
the speech prosody. The relationship between both evaluations is achieved by an attribute selection process guided by a metric
that measures the matching between the misclassified utterances by the users and the automatic process. The experiments show
that this approach can be useful to provide a subset of utterances with poor or wrong expressive content.
This work has been partially supported by the European Commission, project SALERO FP6 IST-4-027122-IP.