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 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:
- 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);
- 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 foreign accent.
- Transcription (linguistics)
- Spoken English Corpus
- The BABEL Speech Corpus
- 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.
- Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English
- Buckeye Corpus The Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech
- Spoken Language Corpora at the Research Center on Multilingualism
- 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
- BAS Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals
- Simmortel Speech Recognition Corpus for Indian English and Hindi
- ELRA: the European Language Resources Association