The GlobalPhone corpus developed in collaboration with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) was designed to provide read speech data for the development and evaluation of large continuous speech recognition systems in the most widespread languages of the world, and to provide a uniform, multilingual speech and text database for language independent and language adaptive speech recognition as well as for language identification tasks. The entire GlobalPhone corpus enables the acquisition of acoustic-phonetic knowledge of the following 20 spoken languages: Arabic (ELRA-S0192), Bulgarian (ELRA-S0319), Chinese-Mandarin (ELRA-S0193), Chinese-Shanghai (ELRA-S0194), Croatian (ELRA-S0195), Czech (ELRA-S0196), French (ELRA-S0197), German (ELRA-S0198), Hausa (ELRA-S0347), Japanese (ELRA-S0199), Korean (ELRA-S0200), Polish (ELRA-S0320), Portuguese (Brazilian) (ELRA-S0201), Russian (ELRA-S0202), Spanish (Latin America) (ELRA-S0203), Swedish (ELRA-S0204), Tamil (ELRA-S0205), Thai (ELRA-S0321), Turkish (ELRA-S0206), Vietnamese (ELRA-S0322). In each language about 100 sentences were read from each of the 100 speakers. The read texts were selected from national newspapers available via Internet to provide a large vocabulary (up to 65,000 words). The read articles cover national and international political news as well as economic news. The speech is available in 16bit, 16kHz mono quality, recorded with a close-speaking microphone (Sennheiser 440-6) and same recording equipment for all languages. The transcriptions are internally validated and supplemented by special markers for spontaneous effects like stuttering, false starts, and non-verbal effects like laughing and hesitations. Speaker information like age, gender, occupation, etc. as well as information about the recording setup complement the database. The entire GlobalPhone corpus contains over 450 hours of speech spoken by more than 1900 native adult speakers. Data is shortened by means of the shorten program written by Tony Robinson, available from Softsound's web page: http://www.softsound.com/ linux distributions, or simulated versions such as cygwin. Alternatively, the data could be delivered unshorten. The Polish part of GlobalPhone was collected from altogether 102 native speakers in Poland, of which 48 speakers were female and 54 speakers were male. The majority of speakers are between 20 and 39 years old, the age distribution ranges from 18 to 65 years. Most of the speakers are non-smokers in good health conditions. Each speaker read on average about 100 utterances from newspaper articles, in total we recorded 10130 utterances. The speech was recorded using a close-talking microphone Sennheiser HM420 in a push-to-talk scenario. All data were recorded at 16kHz and 16bit resolution in PCM format. The data collection took place in small and large rooms, about half of the recordings took place under very quiet noise conditions, the other half with moderate background noise. Information on recording place and environmental noise conditions are provided in a separate speaker session file for each speaker. The text data used for recording mainly came from the news posted in an online edition of a national Polish newspaper Dziennik Polski, (http://www.dziennik.krakow.pl/). We followed the standard GlobalPhone protocols and focused on national and international politics and economics news (see [SCHULTZ 2002]). In sum, 10130 utterances were spoken. The transcriptions are provided in Polish script in UTF-8 encoding and are also mapped to Roman script (Ascii). The Polish data are organized in a training set of 82 speakers, a development set of 10 speakers, and an evaluation set of another 10 speakers. [Schultz 2002] Tanja Schultz (2002): GlobalPhone: A Multilingual Speech and Text Database developed at Karlsruhe University, Proceedings of the International Conference of Spoken Language Processing, ICSLP 2002, Denver, CO, September 2002.

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