Czech Spontaneous Speech Collection and Annotation: The Database of Technical Lectures

摘要

Applying speech recognition into real working systems, spontaneous speech recognition has increasing importance. For the development purposes of such applications, the need of spontaneous speech database is evident both for general design or training and testing of such systems. This paper describes the collection of Czech spontaneous data recorded within technical lectures. It is supposed to be used as a material for the analysis of particular phenomena which appear within spontaneous speech but also as an extension material for training of spontaneous speech recognizers. Mainly the presence of spontaneous speech phenomena such as higher rate of non-speech events, changes in pronunciation, or sentence irregularities, should be the most important contribution of the collected database for the training purposes in comparison to the usage of available read speech databases only. Speech signals are captured in two different channels with slightly different quality and about 14 hours of speech from 15 different speakers are currently collected and annotated. The first analyses of spontaneous speech related effects in the collected data have been performed and the comparison with read speech databases is presented.