An axiom of speech research is there are no data like more data. Annotated speech corpora are essential for progress in all areas of spoken language technology. Current recognition techniques require large amounts of training data to perform well on a given task. Speech synthesis systems require the study of large corpora to model natural intonation. Spoken languages systems require large corpora of human-machine conversations to model interactive dialogue.
In response to this need, there are major efforts underway worldwide to collect, annotate and distribute speech corpora in many languages. These corpora allow scientists to study, understand, and model the different sources of variability, and to develop, evaluate and compare speech technologies on a common basis.
Spoken Language Corpora Activities
Recent advances in speech and language recognition are due in part to the availability of large public domain speech corpora, which have enabled comparative system evaluation using shared testing protocols. The use of common corpora for developing and evaluating speech recognition algorithms is a fairly recent development. One of first corpora used for common evaluation, the TI-DIGITS corpus, recorded in 1984, has been (and still is) widely used as a test base for isolated and connected digit recognition
Challenges in spoken language corpora are many.
