Articulation Index LSCP

LDC2015S12

Introduction

Articulation Index LSCP, Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) Catalog Number LDC2015S12 and ISBN 1-58563-735-1, was developed by researchers at Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (LSCP), Ecole Normale Supérieure. It revises and enhances a subset of Articulation Index (AIC) (LDC2005S22), a corpus of persons speaking English syllables. Changes include the addition of forced alignment to sound files, time alignment of syllable utterances and format conversions.

AIC consists of 20 American English speakers (12 males, 8 females) pronouncing syllables, some of which form actual words, but most of which are nonsense syllables. All possible Consonant-Vowel (CV) and Vowel-Consonant (VC) combinations were recorded for each speaker twice, once in isolation and once within a carrier-sentence, for a total of 25768 recorded syllables.

Data

Articulation Index LSCP alters AIC in the following ways.

  1. Time-alignments for the onset and offset of each word and syllable were generated through forced-alignment with a standard HMM-GMM (Hidden Markov Model-Gaussian Mixture Model) ASR system.
  2. The time-alignments for the beginning and end of the syllables (whether in isolation or within a carrier sentence) were manually adjusted. The time-alignments for the other words in carrier sentences were not manually adjusted.
  3. The recordings of isolated syllables were cut according to the manual time-alignments to remove the silent portions at the beginning and end, and the time-alignments were altered to correspond to the cut recordings.
  4. The file naming scheme was slightly altered for compatibility with the Kaldi speech recognition toolkit.
  5. AIC contains a wide-band (16 KHz, 16-bit PCM) and a narrow-band (8 KHz, 8 bit u-law) version of the recordings distributed in sphere format. The LSCP version contains the wide-band version only distributed as wave files.

This release does not include certain AIC triphone recordings (CVC, CCV or VCC).

Audio data is presented as 16kHz 16-bit flac compressed .wav files. The flac compression was added for distribution, and documentation may refer to the files as .wav files.

Directory Structure

Please see file.tbl for a complete file list as well as checksums for this publication.

Updates

Additional information, updates, bug fixes may be available in the LDC catalog entry for this corpus at LDC2015S12.

Content Copyright

Portions © 2015 Tomas Bergvelt, Anna Kolesnikov, Xuan-Nga Cao, Thomas Schatz, Emmanuel Dupoux, © 2015 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania