Mental health concerns have garnered increasing attention, highlighting the importance of timely and accurate identification of individual stress states as a critical research domain. This study employs the multimodal StressID dataset to evaluate the contributions of three modalities—physiological signals, video, and audio—in stress recognition tasks. A set of machine learning models, including Random Forests (RF), Support Vector Machines (SVM), Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLP), and K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), were trained and tested with optimized parameters for each modality. In addition, the effectiveness of different multimodal fusion strategies was systematically examined. The unimodal experiments revealed that the physiological modality achieved the highest performance in the binary stress classification task (F1-score = 0.751), whereas the audio modality outperformed the others in the three-class classification task (F1-score = 0.625). In the multimodal setting, feature-level fusion yielded stable improvements in the binary classification task, while decision-level fusion achieved superior performance in the three-class classification task (F1-score = 0.65). These findings demonstrate that multimodal integration can substantially enhance the accuracy of stress recognition. Future research directions include incorporating temporal modeling and addressing data imbalance to further improve the robustness and applicability of stress recognition systems.

This article presents an overview of the existing acoustical corpuses suitable for broadcast news automatic transcription task in the Slovak language. The TUKE-BNews-SK database created in our department was built to support the application development for automatic broadcast news processing and spontaneous speech recognition of the Slovak language. The audio corpus is composed of 479 Slovak TV broadcast news shows from public Slovak television called STV1 or “Jednotka” containing 265 hours of material and 186 hours of clean transcribed speech (4 hours subset extracted for testing purposes). The recordings were manually transcribed using Transcriber tool modified for Slovak annotators and automatic Slovak spell checking. The corpus design, acquisition, annotation scheme and pronunciation transcription is described together with corpus statistics and tools used. Finally the evaluation procedure using automatic speech recognition is presented on the broadcast news and parliamentary speeches test sets.