Speech corpus

For a broader coverage of this topic, see Corpus linguistics.

A speech corpus (or spoken corpus) is a database of speech audio files and text transcriptions. In speech technology, speech corpora are used, among other things, to create acoustic models (which can then be used with a speech recognition engine). In linguistics, spoken corpora are used to do research into phonetic, conversation analysis, dialectology and other fields.

A corpus is one such database. Corpora is the plural of corpus (i.e. it is many such databases).

There are two types of Speech Corpora:

1. Read Speech – which includes:
   • Book excerpts
   • Broadcast news
   • Lists of words
   • Sequences of numbers
2. Spontaneous Speech – which includes:
   • Dialogs – between two or more people (includes meetings);
   • Narratives – a person telling a story (one such corpus is the Buckeye Corpus);
   • Map-tasks – one person explains a route on a map to another;
   • Appointment-tasks – two people try to find a common meeting time based on individual schedules.

A special kind of speech corpora are non-native speech databases that contain speech with foreign accent.

See also

• Arabic Speech Corpus
• EXMARaLDA
• List of children's speech corpora
• Non-native speech database
• Praat
• Spoken English Corpus
• The BABEL Speech Corpus
• TIMIT
• Transcriber
• Transcription (linguistics)

References

• Edwards, Jane / Lampert, Martin (eds.) (1992): Talking Data – Transcription and Coding in Discourse Research. Hillsdale: Erlbaum.
• Leech, Geoffrey / Myers, Greg / Thomas, Jenny (eds.) (1995): Spoken English on Computer: Transcription, Markup and Application. Harlow: Longman.

External links

• Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English
• Buckeye Corpus The Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech
• Spoken Language Corpora at the Research Center on Multilingualism
• The Spoken Turkish Corpus at METU Ankara
• Spoken Corpus Klient with the Corp-Oral Corpus at ILTEC Lisbon
• VoxForge – open source speech corpora
• OLAC: Open Language Archives Community
• BAS Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals
• Simmortel Speech Recognition Corpus for Indian English and Hindi
• ELRA: the European Language Resources Association
• The PELCRA Conversational Corpus of Polish
• The Arabic Speech Corpus