A speech corpus (or spoken corpus) is a
database
In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and a ...
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. It is also ...
or
speaker identification engine).
In
linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
, 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,
dialectology
Dialectology (from Ancient Greek, Greek , ''dialektos'', "talk, dialect"; and , ''-logy, -logia'') is the scientific study of dialects: subsets of languages. Though in the 19th century a branch of historical linguistics, dialectology is often now c ...
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);
#* 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 a foreign accent.
See also
*
Arabic Speech Corpus
*
Common Voice
*
EXMARaLDA
*
Lingua Libre, an online
libre
Libre may refer to:
Computing
* Libre software, free software
* Libre Computer Project, developer of open-hardware single-board computers
Medicine
*FreeStyle Libre, a glucose monitoring device
Music
* ''Libre'' (Alejandra Guzmán album)
* ''Li ...
tool
*
List of children's speech corpora
A child speech corpus is a speech corpus documenting first-language language acquisition. Such databases are used in the development of computer-assisted language learning systems and the characterization of children's speech at difference ages. ...
*
Non-native speech database
A non-native speech database is a Speech corpus, speech database of non-native pronunciations of English. Such databases are used in the development of: multilingual automatic speech recognition systems, Text-to-speech, text to speech systems, pron ...
*
Praat
Praat ( , ; ) is a free, open-source computer software package widely used for speech analysis and synthesis in phonetics and other fields of linguistics. It was designed and continues to be developed by Paul Boersma and David Weenink at the ...
*
Spoken English Corpus
*
The BABEL Speech Corpus
*
TIMIT
TIMIT is a corpus of phonemically and lexically transcribed speech of American English speakers of different sexes and dialects. Each transcribed element has been delineated in time.
TIMIT was designed to further acoustic-phonetic knowledge and a ...
*
Transcriber
*
Transcription (linguistics)
In linguistics, transcription is the systematic representation of spoken language in written form. The source can either be utterances (''speech'' or ''sign language'') or preexisting text in another writing system
A writing system compris ...
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 EnglishBuckeye CorpusThe 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 AnkaraSpoken Corpus Klient with the Corp-Oral Corpus at ILTEC LisbonVoxForge – open source speech corporaOLAC: Open Language Archives CommunitySimmortel Speech Recognition Corpus for Indian English and HindiELRA: the European Language Resources AssociationThe PELCRA Conversational Corpus of PolishThe Arabic Speech CorpusCorpus of Political Speeches: Free access to political speeches by American and Chinese politicians, developed by Hong Kong Baptist University Library
Large Multimodal Corpus of Human Speech
Corpora
Corpus linguistics
Speech recognition
Dialectology
Phonetics
Language documentation
de:Textkorpus
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