Hispanic-English Database
| Item Name: | Hispanic-English Database |
| Author(s): | William Byrne, Eva Knodt, Jared Bernstein, Farzhad Emami |
| LDC Catalog No.: | LDC2014S05 |
| ISBN: | 1-58563-633-9 |
| ISLRN: | 838-711-181-871-3 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.35111/mss2-fb97 |
| Release Date: | May 15, 2014 |
| Member Year(s): | 2014 |
| DCMI Type(s): | Sound |
| Sample Type: | pcm |
| Sample Rate: | 8000 |
| Data Source(s): | microphone speech |
| Application(s): | speaker identification, speech activity detection, speech recognition, spoken dialogue modeling |
| Language(s): | Spanish, English |
| Language ID(s): | spa, eng |
| License(s): |
LDC User Agreement for Non-Members |
| Online Documentation: | LDC2014S05 Documents |
| Licensing Instructions: | Subscription & Standard Members, and Non-Members |
| Citation: | Byrne, William, et al. Hispanic-English Database LDC2014S05. Web Download. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, 2014. |
| Related Works: | View |
Introduction
Hispanic-English Database contains approximately 30 hours of English and Spanish conversational and read speech with transcripts (24 hours) and metadata collected from 22 non-native English speakers between 1996 and 1998. The corpus was developed by Entropic Research Laboratory, Inc., a developer of speech recognition and speech synthesis software toolkits that was acquired by Microsoft in 1999.
Participants were adult native speakers of Spanish as spoken in Central America and South America who resided in the Palo Alto, California area, had lived in the United States for at least one year and demonstrated a basic ability to understand, read and speak English. They read a total of 2200 sentences, 50 each in Spanish and English per speaker. The Spanish sentence prompts were a subset of the materials in LATINO-40 Spanish Read News, and the English sentence prompts were taken from the TIMIT database. Conversations were task-oriented, drawing on exercises similar to those used in English second language instruction and designed to engage the speakers in collaborative, problem-solving activities.
Data
Read speech was recorded on two wideband channels with a Shure SM10A head-mounted microphone in a quiet laboratory environment. The conversational speech was simultaneously recorded on four channels, two of which were used to place phone calls to each subject in two separate offices and to record the incoming speech of the two channels into separate files. The audio was originally saved under the Entropic Audio (ESPS) format using a 16kHz sampling rate and 16 bit samples. Audio files were converted to flac compressed .wav files from the ESPS format. ESPS headers were removed and are presented in this release as *.hdr files that include demographic and technical data.
Transcripts were developed with the Entropic Annotator tool and are time-aligned with speaker turns. The transcription conventions were based on those used in the LDC Switchboard and CALLHOME collections. Transcript files are denoted with a .lab extension.
Data files and their corresponding label files are stored in subdirectories named using a speaker-pair id and session number. The first three letters identify the speaker on channel A. The last three letters identify the speaker on channel B. Wideband audio files contain *.wb.flac in their file name, and narrow band audio files are denoted with a *.nb.flac in the file name.
Samples
Please view these samples:
Updates
None at this time.