Glissando-sp

Full Official Name: Glissando-sp
Submission date: July 5, 2019, 5:20 p.m.

Glissando-sp includes more than 12 hours of speech in Spanish, recorded under optimal acoustic conditions, orthographically transcribed, phonetically aligned and annotated with prosodic information (location of the stressed syllables and prosodic phrasing). The corpus was recorded by 8 professional speakers and 20 non-professional speakers: 4 “news broadcaster” professional speakers (2 male and 2 female), 4 “advertising” professional speakers (2 male and 2 female), and 20 non-professional speakers (10 male and 10 female). Glissando-sp has been specially designed for prosodic studies, but can be used also for other purposes. Its structure, as well as the high number of speakers who recorded the corpus, makes the Glissando corpus especially suitable for inter-speaker and inter-style prosodic analyses. Glissando-sp has an equivalent corpus for Catalan, Glissando-ca, with the same structure and features, which make them suitable also for inter language comparisons (see ELRA-T0407). Both corpora are the result of a coordinated project involving Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and the University of Valladolid (UVA). Glissando-sp is made of three subcorpora: 1) the “News” subcorpus contains the recordings of readings of real news texts (provided by “Cadena Ser” radio station), which were modified to meet the desired segmental and prosodic requirements established for the corpus (“Prosodic” subcorpus with 36 recordings of texts meeting prosodic criteria and “Phonetic” subcorpus with 36 recordings of texts meeting segmental criteria). It was recorded by 8 professional speakers, four of them having a “news broadcaster” and four an “advertising” profile. Four of them recorded both the “Prosodic” and “Phonetic” subcorpora, and four only the “Prosodic” subcorpus. Every text was designed to be read in one minute approximately, although the actual duration of the recordings depends on the speaker. 2) the “Task dialogues” subcorpus contains a set of recorded interactions between two speakers oriented to a specific goal in the domain of information requests. In each conversation, one of the speakers plays the role of instruction-giver and the other, the role of instruction follower. Three types of interactions were recorded: a) telephone-like conversations between an operator and a customer who wants information on prices and schedules of a specific route, b) information requests for an exchange university between a school’s administrative officer that provides information on the possibilities for a course at a foreign university and a student who requests for it, and c) one of the speakers plays the role of somebody who is planning a trip to the Greek island of Corfu, and calls a colleague who has lived for 5 years in Greece, in order to request for specific information concerning the route on the island. There is no specific route to reproduce; there is only an initial and a final point of the trip, and some places to visit on the way. These tasks were performed by 12 different pairs of speakers: 1 pair of “news broadcaster” professional speakers, 1 pair of “advertising” professional speakers, and 10 pairs of non-professional speakers. 3) the “Free dialogues” subcorpus contains a set of recordings of conversations between people who have some degree of familiarity with each other. The dialogue was started from the question “Do you remember how you met each other?”, but the speakers were free to change to other topics during their conversation. These conversations were recorded by 6 different pairs of speakers: 1 pair of “news broadcaster” professional speakers, 1 pair of “advertising” professional speakers, 4 pairs of non-professional speakers. Recordings were made at a soundproof room of the Audiovisual Media Service of the University of Valladolid, in Valladolid. A Marantz PMD670/W1B and a Marantz PMD560 recorders, with a Mackie CR1604-VLZ mixer, were used for recordings, at a sampling frequency of 44 KHz. All the recordings were made using two microphones for each speaker: a fixed directional one (Neumann TLM103 P48) and a headset wireless one (Senheisser EW100-G2). Recordings were stored in wav files: mono files for the “News” subcorpus and stereo files, containing in separate channels the speech of the two participants in the conversation (they were recorded using different microphones), for the “Task” and “Free” dialogues. The corpus includes the orthographic transcription of the recordings in separate files: txt files, containing only the raw text, in the case of the “News” corpus (these files contain the actual text read by every speaker) and xml files, containing an enriched transcription of the conversations, carried out by human transcribers, following TEI conventions, in the case of “Task” and “Free” dialogues. Word-by-word orthographic transcription is also provided in a Praat TextGrid file, timealigned with the signal. This Praat TextGrid file includes also the phonetic transcription of the recordings, timealigned with the speech signal: automatically transcribed from the news texts, automatically aligned and then revised by human experts, in the case of the “News” subcorpus, and automatically transcribed from the orthographical transcriptions of conversations and automatically aligned, in the case of the “Task” and “Free” dialogues subcorpora. The phonetic transcription was done using the SAMPA phonetic alphabet. The TextGrid file includes also three tiers with the segmentation in syllables, major intonation groups and minor intonation groups: obtained automatically using prosodic annotation tools and then revised by human experts, in the case of the “News” subcorpus, and obtained automatically using prosodic annotation tools, in the case of the “Task” and “Free” dialogues subcorpora.

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