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 (which can then be used with a speech recognition or speaker identification 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:
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Read Speech, which includes:
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Book excerpts
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Broadcast news
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Lists of words
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Sequences of numbers
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Spontaneous Speech, which includes:
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Dialogs – between two or more people (includes meetings; one such corpus is the KEC);
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Narratives – a person telling a story (one such corpus is the Buckeye Corpus);
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Map-tasks – one person explains a route on a map to another;
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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
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Edwards, Jane / Lampert, Martin (eds.) (1992): Talking Data – Transcription and Coding in Discourse Research. Hillsdale: Erlbaum.
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Leech, Geoffrey / Myers, Greg / Thomas, Jenny (eds.) (1995): Spoken English on Computer: Transcription, Markup and Application. Harlow: Longman.
External links