Articulation Index
| Item Name: | Articulation Index |
| Author(s): | Jonathan Wright |
| LDC Catalog No.: | LDC2005S22 |
| ISBN: | 1-58563-346-1 |
| ISLRN: | 513-688-150-766-0 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.35111/qmyb-6884 |
| Release Date: | September 15, 2005 |
| Member Year(s): | 2005 |
| DCMI Type(s): | Sound |
| Sample Type: | pcm |
| Sample Rate: | 16000, 8000 |
| Data Source(s): | microphone speech |
| Application(s): | language identification, language modeling, natural language processing, parsing, pronunciation modeling |
| Language(s): | English |
| Language ID(s): | eng |
| License(s): |
LDC User Agreement for Non-Members |
| Online Documentation: | LDC2005S22 Documents |
| Licensing Instructions: | Subscription & Standard Members, and Non-Members |
| Citation: | Wright, Jonathan. Articulation Index LDC2005S22. Web Download. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, 2005. |
| Related Works: | View |
Introduction
Articulation Index was developed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and contains 34 hours of prompted and conversational English speech. The corpus was partly inspired by the work of Harvey Fletcher, who performed a number of perceptual experiments involving English syllables during the first half of the 20th century. His term articulation index meant something like perceptual index of syllables, where those syllables were not necessarily words, and reflected how well speakers could correctly identify syllables in the presence of noise. This corpus was created to facilitate similar experiments, as well as to potentially facilitate new methods in speech recognition research.
The basic concept behind the corpus was to record speakers pronouncing syllables of English, some of which might be real words, but most of which are nonsense syllables. The goal was to have each speaker say a set of 2,000 syllables common to all speakers, as well as a set of 20 syllables unique to that speaker.
LDC has also released Articulation Index LSCP (LDC2015S12), which adds time alignment and different formats to a subset of this corpus.
Data
This release contains recordings of 20 American English speakers (12 males, eight females) saying 2005 common syllables, 1845 of which were spoken by all speakers, and 400 unique syllables (20 syllables/speaker). Participants were prompted with an automatically generated sentence containing the desired syllable followed by an isolated pronunciation of the syllable. The data contains separate files for the whole recorded phrases and the isolated syllables. The corpus also contains short conversations between participants. Here's a breadown of the extent for each folder:
- Phrases: 22.8 hours
- Syllables: 10.2 hours
- Conversation: 1.2 hours
The recordings were made in a small, sound-treated anechoic room at LDC. The speakers wore two microphones: a Sennheiser 410 headset and a Nortel Liberator wireless phone headset. The Sennheiser's signal traveled through a Symetrix 302 Dual Microphone Preamp, Sony PCM-R300 DAT deck, and Townshend Datlink to a Sun Sparcserver 20 where it was written to disk at 16 kHz, 16-bit, pcm data. The Nortel's signal was transmitted to a wireless base station at a telephone connected via the network to LDC's telephone recording platform where it was captured to disk as 8 kHz, 8-bit, u-law data.
The speakers were prompted via a computer interface that displayed one prompt at a time, allowing them to iterate through the prompts by pressing a "next" button. Each recording session lasted approximately 15 minutes.
Samples
For an example of the data in this corpus, please listen to this sample (WAV).
Updates
None at this time.