A speech corpus (or spoken corpus) is a

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases sp ...

of speech audio files and text transcriptions. In

speech technology Speech technology relates to the technologies designed to duplicate and respond to the human voice. They have many uses. These include aid to the voice-disabled, the hearing-disabled, and the blind, along with communication with computers without a ...

, speech corpora are used, among other things, to create acoustic models (which can then be used with a

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 ...

speaker identification Speaker recognition is the identification of a person from characteristics of voices. It is used to answer the question "Who is speaking?" The term voice recognition can refer to ''speaker recognition'' or speech recognition. Speaker verification ...

engine). In

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

, spoken corpora are used to do research into

phonetic Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...

conversation analysis Conversation analysis (CA) is an approach to the study of social interaction, embracing both verbal and non-verbal conduct, in situations of everyday life. CA originated as a sociological method, but has since spread to other fields. CA began with ...

dialectology Dialectology (from Greek , ''dialektos'', "talk, dialect"; and , ''-logia'') is the scientific study of linguistic dialect, a sub-field of sociolinguistics. It studies variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their assoc ...

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: # Read Speech – which includes: #* Book excerpts #* Broadcast news #* Lists of words #* Sequences of numbers # Spontaneous Speech – which includes: #* Dialogs – between two or more people (includes meetings; one such corpus is the KEC); #* Narratives – a person telling a story (one such corpus is the

Buckeye Corpus The Buckeye Corpus of conversational speech is a speech corpus created by a team of linguists and psychologists at Ohio State University led by Prof. Mark Pitt. Dilley, L., & Pitt, M. (2007). A study of regressive place assimilation in spontaneous s ...

); #* 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.

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
The KEC -- The Karl Eberhards Corpus of spontaneously spoken southern German in dialogues - audio and articulatory recordings

* ttp://std.metu.edu.tr/en/ 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

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

Corpus of Political Speeches
: Free access to political speeches by American and Chinese politicians, developed by Hong Kong Baptist University Library Corpora Corpus linguistics Speech recognition Dialectology Phonetics Language documentation de:Textkorpus {{corpora-stub

See also

References

External links