SHACHI - Language Resource Metadata Database

Desktop/Microphone
The SMARTWEB UMTS data collection was created within the publicly funded German SmartWeb project in the years 2004-2006. It comprises a collection of user queries to a naturally spoken Web interface with the main focus on the soccer world series in 2006. The recordings include field recordings using a hand-held UMTS device (one person, SmartWeb Handheld Corpus SHC, ref. ELRA-S0278), field recordings with video capture of the primary speaker and a secondary speaker (SmartWeb Video Corpus SVC, ref. ELRA-S0279), as well as mobile recordings performed on a BMW motorbike (one speaker, SmartWeb Motorbike Corpus SMC, ref. ELRA-S0280).

This corpus corresponds to mobile recordings performed on a BMW motorbike (SmartWeb Motorbike Corpus SMC) and contains recordings spoken by 36 speakers in a human-machine query situation on a running motor cycle (BMW). Bikers were asked to solve several tasks with a spoken query system to the WWW using an integrated system connected to a speech server via an UMTS connection. Recorded channels are the Bluetooth helmet microphone over UMTS (telephone quality), and - partly - the Bluetooth helmet microphone and an additional neck microphone in high quality.

The corpus contains:
- Total number of recorded queries: 2,315
- Total duration segmented speech: 377 minutes
- Formats: WAV 44,1kHz, 16 bit, ALAW 8kHz 8bit, Verbmobil transliteration, BAS Partitur Format (BPF)
- Segmentation: automatic segmentation into queries by the recording server
- Distribution: 3 DVD-R

See also ELRA-S0278 and ELRA-S0280.

Multimodal/Multimedia Resources
The SMARTWEB UMTS data collection was created within the publicly funded German SmartWeb project in the years 2004-2006. It comprises a collection of user queries to a naturally spoken Web interface with the main focus on the soccer world series in 2006. The recordings include field recordings using a hand-held UMTS device (one person, SmartWeb Handheld Corpus SHC, ref. ELRA-S0278), field recordings with video capture of the primary speaker and a secondary speaker (SmartWeb Video Corpus SVC, ref. ELRA-S0279), as well as mobile recordings performed on a BMW motorbike (one speaker, SmartWeb Motorbike Corpus SMC, ref. ELRA-S0280).

This multimodal corpus corresponds to the video capture of the primary speaker and a secondary speaker (SmartWeb Video Corpus) and contains 99 recordings each containing a human-human-machine dialogue: one speaker (which is being recorded) interacts with a human partner as well with a dialogue system via a smart phone (SmartWeb system).

The speaker uses a client-server based dialogue system (SmartWeb) for spoken access to Internet contents in a natural environment (office, hallway, street, park, cafe, etc.). Speech was captured over a Bluetooth headset and transferred via an UMTS cellular line to the server; a second collar attached microphone was captured on a portable iRiver recorder to yield an undisturbed, high quality reference signal. The face of the speaker was captured by the build-in face camera of the smart phone. The speech signal was segmented into queries (automatically by the prompting system) and a second time manually into turns and transcribed according to Verbmobil transliteration standard. The video signal was labelled manually into OnView / OffView and - partly - spatially segmented for face detection.

The motivation for this corpus was to capture realistic multimodal (speech + face) data in a realistic human machine interaction as well as to capture as many OffTalk situations as possible (OffTalk being all speech uttered by the speaker that is not intended as input to the system).

The corpus contains:
- number of dialogues / recorded speakers: 99
- number of segmented turns: 2,218
- total duration: 971 minutes
- formats:
o collar mic: WAV 44,1kHz, 16 bit
o Bluetooth/UMTS-channel: ALAW 8kHz 8bit
o video: 176x144, 24bpp, 15fps, 3GPP + MPEG1
o Verbmobil Transliteration (TRS), BAS Partitur Format (BPF), ATLAS Annotation Graph (XML)
o meta data: speaker and recording protocol (XML)
- segmentation: automatic segmentation into input queries by the prompting system; manual segmentation into turns; OffTalk labelling; OffView labelling, spatially segmentation of face (partly manually)
- distribution: 5 DVD-R

See also ELRA-S0278 and ELRA-S0279.

Telephone
The LILA Hindi-L1 database collected in India was recorded within the scope of the LILA project. It contains the recordings of 2,030 Hindi speakers (1,012 males and 1,018 females, all speakers with Hindi as first language) recorded over the Indian mobile telephone network.

The following acoustic conditions were selected as representative of a mobile user's environment (some speakers were recorded in several environments):
- Passenger in moving car, railway, bus, etc. (297 speakers)
- Public place (299 speakers)
- Stationary pedestrian by road side (305 speakers)
- Home/office environment (719 speakers)
- Passenger in moving car using a hands-free kit (410 speakers)

This database is distributed as 2 DVD-ROMs. The speech files are stored as sequences of 8-bit, 8kHz A-law speech files and are not compressed, according to the specifications of LILA. Each prompt utterance is stored within a separate file and has an accompanying ASCII SAM label file.

This speech database was validated by SPEX (the Netherlands) to assess its compliance with the LILA format and content specifications.

Each speaker uttered the following items:
- 2 isolated digits
- 1 sequence of 10 isolated digits
- 7 connected digits (2 sheet numbers -5+ digits, 2 read telephone numbers –9/11 digits, 1 credit card number –14/16 digits, 1 PIN code -6 digits, 1 spontaneous telephone number)
- 1 natural number
- 1 currency money amount
- 2 yes/no questions (1 predominantly “yes” question, 1 predominantly “no” question)
- 3 dates (1 spontaneous date e.g. birthday, 1 word style prompted date, 1 relative and general date expression)
- 2 time phrases (1 spontaneous time of day, 1 word style time phrase)
- 6 application words (out of a set of 30)
- 1 spotting phrase using an embedded application word
- 5 directory assistance names (1 spontaneous, e.g. own surname, 1 city of birth/growing up, 1 most frequent city out of a set of 500, 1 most frequent company/agency out of a set of 500, 1 “forename surname” out of a set of 150 )
- 3 spelled words (1 surname, 1 directory assistance city name, 1 real/artificial name for coverage)
- 1 “silence word”
- 4 phonetically rich words
- 13 phonetically rich sentences
- 7 spontaneous items for control

The following age distribution has been obtained: 965 speakers are between 16 and 30, 645 speakers are between 31 and 45, and 420 speakers are between 46 and 60.

A pronunciation lexicon with a phonemic transcription in SAMPA is also included.

Desktop/Microphone
The Ph@ttSessionz speech database, funded by the German Ministry of Science and Education (BMBF), contains recordings of 864 adolescent speakers of German (age range 12-20). The recordings were performed via the WWW in public schools (Gymnasium) in 41 locations in Germany. The speech material recorded is a superset of the German SpeechDat-II and RVG-I corpora (see also ELRA-S0051, S0058, S0063, S0096 and S0155). Recordings were done with SpeechRecorder in selected schools in the years 2005-2007. Both channels, the headset and the desktop microphone, were recorded in high quality.

The BAS PHATT corpus is available in two versions: BAS PHATT 1.0.X (sub-set, ELRA-S0282-01) and BAS PHATT 1.1.X (complete corpus, ELRA-S0282-02).

BAS PHATT 1.0.X contains:
- 41 items (42 to 83), including 11 telephone numbers and 30 phonetically balanced sentences
- Total number of recordings: approx. 35,000
- Duration: ca. 4,100 minutes
- Formats: WAV 22,05kHz, 16 bit, SpeechDat Transliteration, BAS Partitur Format (BPF)
- Segmentation: manual segmentation begin/end utterance, automatic phonemic segmentation with MAUS
- Distribution: 5 DVD-R Iso 9660

See also ELRA-S0082-02.

Desktop/Microphone
The Ph@ttSessionz speech database, funded by the German Ministry of Science and Education (BMBF), contains recordings of 864 adolescent speakers of German (age range 12-20). The recordings were performed via the WWW in public schools (Gymnasium) in 41 locations in Germany. The speech material recorded is a superset of the German SpeechDat-II and RVG-I corpora (see also ELRA-S0051, S0058, S0063, S0096 and S0155). Recordings were done with SpeechRecorder in selected schools in the years 2005-2007. Both channels, the headset and the desktop microphone, were recorded in high quality.

The BAS PHATT corpus is available in two versions: BAS PHATT 1.0.X (sub-set, ELRA-S0282-01) and BAS PHATT 1.1.X (complete corpus, ELRA-S0282-02).

BAS PHATT 1.1.X contains:
- 138 items:
- 12 single digits
- 18 numbers
- 12 commands
- 30 phonetically rich sentences
- 13 telephone numbers
- 9 digit strings: 3 all digits, 3 credit card numbers, 3 PIN codes
- 3 date expressions
- 12 spelling items: 2 arbitrary sequences, 5 geographical names, 5 person names
- 3 geographical names
- 3 company names
- 2 person names
- 11 phonetics test sentences
- 3 time expressions
- 8 spontaneous texts (text production): 5 short texts, 3 long texts
- Total number of recordings: approx. 120,000
- Duration: ca. 12,500 minutes
- Formats: WAV 22,05kHz, 16 bit, SpeechDat Transliteration, BAS Partitur Format (BPF)
- Segmentation: manual segmentation begin/end utterance, automatic phonemic segmentation with MAUS
- Distribution: 15 DVD-R Iso 9660

See also ELRA-S0082-01.

Multimodal/Multimedia Resources
This is an audio-visual speech database for training and testing of Czech audio-visual continuous speech recognition systems. The corpus consists of about 25 hours of audio-visual records of 65 speakers in laboratory conditions. Data collection was done with static illumination, and recorded subjects were instructed to remain static.

The average speaker age was 22 years old. Speakers were asked to read 200 sentences each (50 common for all speakers and 150 specific to each speaker). The average total length of recording per speaker is 23 minutes.

All audio-visual data are transcribed (.trs files) and divided into sentences (one sentence per file). For each video file we get the description file containing information about the position and size of the region of interest.

Acoustic data are stored in wave files using PCM format, sampling frequency 44kHz, resolution 16 bits. Each speaker’s acoustic data set represents about 140 MB of disk space (about 9 GB as a whole).

Visual data are stored in video files (.avi format) using the digital video (DV) codec. Visual data per speaker take about 3 GB of disk (about 195 GB as a whole) and are stored on an IDE hard disk (NTFS format).

Multimodal/Multimedia Resources
This is an audio-visual speech database for training and testing of Czech audio-visual continuous speech recognition systems collected with impaired illumination conditions. The corpus consists of about 20 hours of audio-visual records of 50 speakers in laboratory conditions. Recorded subjects were instructed to remain static. The illumination varied and chunks of each speaker were recorded with several different conditions, such as full illumination, or illumination from one side (left or right) only. These conditions make the database usable for training lip-/head-tracking systems under various illumination conditions independently of the language.

Speakers were asked to read 200 sentences each (50 common for all speakers and 150 specific to each speaker). The average total length of recording per speaker was 23 minutes.

Acoustic data are stored in wave files using PCM format, sampling frequency 44kHz, resolution 16 bits. Each speaker’s acoustic data set represents about 180 MB of disk space (about 8.8 GB).

Visual data are stored in video files (.avi format) using the digital video (DV) codec. Visual data per speaker take about 3.7 GB of disk (about 185 GB as a whole) and are stored on an IDE hard disk (NTFS format).

Desktop/Microphone
The Cantonese Speecon database is divided into 2 sets:
1) The first set comprises the recordings of 550 adult Cantonese speakers (273 males, 277 females), recorded over 4 microphone channels in 4 recording environments (office, entertainment, car, public place).
2) The second set comprises the recordings of 50 child Cantonese speakers (22 boys, 28 girls), recorded over 4 microphone channels in 1 recording environment (children room).

This database is partitioned into 29 DVDs (first set) and 4 DVDs (second set).
The speech databases made within the Speecon project were validated by SPEX, the Netherlands, to assess their compliance with the Speecon format and content specifications. Each of the four speech channels is recorded at 16 kHz, 16 bit, uncompressed unsigned integers in Intel format (lo-hi byte order). To each signal file corresponds an ASCII SAM label file which contains the relevant descriptive information.

Each speaker uttered the following items (over 290 items for adults and over 210 items for children):

Calibration data:
- 6 noise recordings
- The “silence word” recording

Free spontaneous items (adults only):
5 minutes (session time) of free spontaneous, rich context items (story telling) (an open number of spontaneous topics out of a set of 30 topics)

17 Elicited spontaneous items (adults only):
3 dates, 2 times, 3 proper names, 2 city names, 1 letter sequence, 2 answers to questions, 3 telephone numbers, 1 language

Read speech:
- 30 phonetically rich sentences uttered by adults and 60 uttered by children
- 5 phonetically rich words (adults only)
- 4 isolated digits
- 1 isolated digit sequence
- 4 connected digit sequences
- 1 telephone number
- 3 natural numbers
- 1 money amount
- 2 time phrases (T1 : analogue, T2 : digital)
- 3 dates (D1 : analogue, D2 : relative and general date, D3 : digital)
- 3 letter sequences
- 1 proper name
- 2 city or street names
- 2 questions
- 2 special keyboard characters
- 1 Web address
- 1 email address
- 221 application specific words and phrases per session (adults)
- 74 toy commands, 14 phone commands and 34 general commands (children)

The following age distribution has been obtained:
- Adults: 233 speakers are between 15 and 30, 234 speakers are between 31 and 45, 83 speakers are over 46.
- Children: 26 speakers are between 8 and 10, and 24 speakers are between 11 and 14.

A pronunciation lexicon with a phonemic transcription in SAMPA is also included.

Desktop/Microphone
The Thai Speecon database is divided into 2 sets:
1) The first set comprises the recordings of 552 adult Thai speakers (273 males, 279 females), recorded over 4 microphone channels in 4 recording environments (office, entertainment, car, public place).
2) The second set comprises the recordings of 50 child Thai speakers (25 boys, 25 girls), recorded over 4 microphone channels in 1 recording environment (children room).

This database is partitioned into 36 DVDs (first set) and 4 DVDs (second set).
The speech databases made within the Speecon project were validated by SPEX, the Netherlands, to assess their compliance with the Speecon format and content specifications. Each of the four speech channels is recorded at 16 kHz, 16 bit, uncompressed unsigned integers in Intel format (lo-hi byte order). To each signal file corresponds an ASCII SAM label file which contains the relevant descriptive information.

Each speaker uttered the following items (over 290 items for adults and over 210 items for children):

Calibration data:
- 6 noise recordings
- The “silence word” recording

Free spontaneous items (adults only):
5 minutes (session time) of free spontaneous, rich context items (story telling) (an open number of spontaneous topics out of a set of 30 topics)

17 Elicited spontaneous items (adults only):
3 dates, 2 times, 3 proper names, 2 city names, 1 letter sequence, 2 answers to questions, 3 telephone numbers, 1 language

Read speech:
- 30 phonetically rich sentences uttered by adults and 60 uttered by children
- 5 phonetically rich words (adults only)
- 4 isolated digits
- 1 isolated digit sequence
- 4 connected digit sequences
- 1 telephone number
- 3 natural numbers
- 1 money amount
- 2 time phrases (T1 : analogue, T2 : digital)
- 3 dates (D1 : analogue, D2 : relative and general date, D3 : digital)
- 8 letter sequences (5 Thai letter sequences, 3 Roman letter sequences)
- 1 proper name
- 2 city or street names
- 2 questions
- 2 special keyboard characters
- 1 Web address
- 1 email address
- 221 application specific words and phrases per session (adults)
- 74 toy commands, 14 phone commands and 34 general commands (children)

The following age distribution has been obtained:
- Adults: 233 speakers are between 15 and 30, 242 speakers are between 31 and 45, 77 speakers are over 46.
- Children: 19 speakers are between 8 and 10, and 31 speakers are between 11 and 15.

A pronunciation lexicon with a phonemic transcription in SAMPA is also included.

Telephone
The OrienTel Jordan MCA (Modern Colloquial Arabic) database comprises 757 Jordanian speakers (393 males, 364 females) recorded over the Jordanian fixed and mobile telephone network. This database is stored on 1 DVD. The speech databases made within the OrienTel project were validated by SPEX, the Netherlands, to assess their compliance with the OrienTel format and content specifications.

Speech samples are stored as sequences of 8-bit 8 kHz A-law. Each prompted utterance is stored in a separate file. Each signal file is accompanied by an ASCII SAM label file which contains the relevant descriptive information.

Each speaker uttered the following items:
• 1 isolated single digit
• 1 sequence of 10 isolated digits
• 5 connected digits : 1 prompt sheet number (6 digits), 1 telephone number (6-15 digits), 1 credit card number (14-16 digits), 1 PIN code (6 digits), 1 spontaneous phone number
• 2 currency money amounts
• 1 natural number
• 4 dates : 1 spontaneous (date or year of birth), 1 prompted date, 1 relative or general date expression, 1 prompted date phrase (Islamic calendar)
• 2 time phrases : 1 time of day (spontaneous), 1 time phrase (word style)
• 3 spelled words : 1 directory assistance personal first name, 1 city name, 1 real word for coverage
• 5 directory assistance utterances : 1 spontaneous, own forename, 1 city of childhood (spontaneous), 1 frequent city name, 1 frequent company name, 1 common forename and surname
• 2 yes/no questions : 1 predominantly ”yes” question, 1 predominantly ”no” question
• 6 application keywords/keyphrases
• 1 word spotting phrase using embedded application words
• 4 phonetically rich words
• 9 phonetically rich sentences
• 3+2 spontaneous items (for control)
• 1 free spontaneous speech (more than 1 sentence)

The following age distribution has been obtained: 427 speakers are between 16 and 30, 230 speakers are between 31 and 45, 100 speakers are between 46 and 60.

A pronunciation lexicon with a phonemic transcription in SAMPA is also included.