TIMIT is a corpus of phonemically and lexically transcribed speech of

American English American English, sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, is the set of variety (linguistics), varieties of the English language native to the United States. English is the Languages of the United States, most widely spoken lan ...

speakers of different sexes and dialects. Each transcribed element has been delineated in time. TIMIT was designed to further acoustic-phonetic knowledge and automatic speech recognition systems. It was commissioned by

DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adv ...

and corpus design was a joint effort between the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

SRI International SRI International (SRI) is an American nonprofit scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The trustees of Stanford University established SRI in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic d ...

, and

Texas Instruments Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is an American technology company headquartered in Dallas, Texas, that designs and manufactures semiconductors and various integrated circuits, which it sells to electronics designers and manufacturers globall ...

(TI). The speech was recorded at TI, transcribed at MIT, and verified and prepared for publishing by the

National Institute of Standards and Technology The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into physical sci ...

(NIST). There is also a telephone bandwidth version called NTIMIT (Network TIMIT). TIMIT and NTIMIT are not freely available — either membership of the

Linguistic Data Consortium The Linguistic Data Consortium is an open consortium of universities, companies and government research laboratories. It creates, collects and distributes speech and text databases, lexicons, and other resources for linguistics research and developm ...

, or a monetary payment, is required for access to the dataset.

History

The TIMIT telephone corpus was an early attempt to create a database with speech samples. It was published in the year 1988 on

CD-ROM A CD-ROM (, compact disc read-only memory) is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains data. Computers can read—but not write or erase—CD-ROMs. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold both comput ...

and consists of only 10 sentences per speaker. Two 'dialect' sentences were read by each speaker, as well as another 7 sentences selected from a larger set Each sentence averages 3 seconds long and is spoken by 630 different speakers. It was the first notable attempt in creating and distributing a

speech corpus 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 or spea ...

and the overall project has produced costs of 1.5 million US$. The full name of the project is DARPA-TIMIT Acoustic-Phonetic Continuous Speech Corpus and the acronym TIMIT stands for Texas Instruments/Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The main reason why a corpus of telephone speech was created was to train

speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the m ...

software. In the Blizzard challenge, different software has the obligation to convert audio recordings into textual data and the TIMIT corpus was used as a standardized baseline.

Machine Learning Method Comparison

References

External links

TIMIT Acoustic-Phonetic Continuous Speech Corpus
{{Corpus linguistics Applied linguistics Computational linguistics Corpora Dialectology Linguistic research Phonetics Speech recognition Speech processing Datasets in machine learning

History

Machine Learning Method Comparison

See also

References

External links