Speech corpus

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 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: 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; one such corpus is the KEC); 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.