A quick walk through phonetic databases

1
A quick walk through phonetic databases

• Read English
• TIMIT
• Boston University Radio News
• Spontaneous English
• Switchboard ICSI transcriptions
• Buckeye Corpus (VIC)

2
TIMIT

• Read phonetically balanced sentences
• Good coverage of different phonetic environments
• Does not exhibit more radical reductions,
  dysfluencies seen in spontaneous speech
• Transcribers started from forced alignments,
  realigned
• Roughly 5 hours of speech
• 630 speakers, 8 dialects, 10 sentences apiece
• Uses ARPAbet symbols
• Separate stop/closure symbols
• Symbol for epenthetic stop
• Cost 100 for non-1993 LDC members

3
TIMIT
4
BU Radio Corpus

• Radio announcers reading news
• 4 male, 3 female reading in both non-studio
  and studio voices
• Originally intended for speech synthesis work
• Marked with prosody in addition to phonetics
• Marked with ARPAbet (similar to TIMIT)
• gt 7 hours of speech
• Cost 400 for non-1996/1997 LDC members

5
BU Radio Corpus
6
Switchboard ICSI Transcriptions

• Spontaneous speech, many dialect regions
• Transcribed segmented turns, some of which may
  be cutoffs, from 2-party conversations
• 4 hours of speech transcribed
• 2 stages
• Initial 1 hour phonetically transcribed
• Hours 2-4 phonetic markers, syllable boundaries
  -- back aligned with phonetic markers
• Similar phoneset to TIMIT
• No separate closure/release
• Voiced hesitations (pn/pv)
• Cost possibly free, possibly 2k for non-1993/7

7
Switchboard ICSI Transcriptions
8
VIC (Buckeye) Corpus

• Spontaneous interview speech
• Age, gender balanced
• All speakers from Ohio
• Currently in transcription
• NIH grant involving Keith, me, and Mark Pitt
• 10 hours completed, 30 hours total
• Based on ARPAbet with a few additions
• Nasalized vowels, glottal stop replacing /t/,
• Cost free (to us) -- might need to work out
  licensing but shouldnt be an issue.

9
VIC (Buckeye) Corpus
10
Evaluating with Corpora

• Clear thing to do is to start with TIMIT
• Facilitates comparison with other things
• However, we should really try to insert
  spontaneous data into research ASAP
• Maybe move to some combination of TIMIT/SWB/VIC?
• Only talked about (American) English
• Other languages in year 4?
• Chin has done some work in Mandarin?
• CASS corpus phonetically transcribed, but
  available?