Multilanguage Telephone Speech Release Version 1.2 Center for Spoken Language Understanding UPDATED: 3 June 2002 Overview -------- The Multi-language Telephone Speech Corpus consists of telephone speech from eleven languages: English, Farsi, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Spanish, Tamil, Vietnamese. The corpus contains fixed vocabulary utterances (eg. days of the week) as well as fluent continuous speech. The current release includes recorded utterances from about 2052 speakers, for a total of about 38.5 hours of speech. Time-aligned phonetic transcriptions for 619 of the utterances are also included. Recording conditions -------------------- Each subject called the CSLU data collection system by dialing a toll-free number. An analog telephone line was connected to a Gradient Technologies box. Data from incoming calls were recorded by the Gradient box. The sampling rate was 8khz and the files were stored in 16bit linear format on a UNIX file system. Each utterance was recorded as a separate file. This corpus was collected and developed in 1992. Subject Population ------------------ Most subjects were respondents to postings on USEnet newsgroups. Subjects were asked to contribute their voice to science to help with the research. Protocol -------- There were two data collection performed to create this corpus. For the initial data collection by Yeshwant Muthusamy, each caller was asked a series of questions designed to elicit: * fixed, useful vocabulary speech * domain-specific vocabulary speech * unrestricted vocabulary speech. Fixed vocabularies were collected in response to the following prompts (the number in parentheses equals the seconds of recording after the prompt): What is you native language? (3 s) What language do you speak most of the time? (3 s) Please recite the seven days of the week. (8 s) Please say the numbers zero through ten. (10 s) Topic-specific descriptions were obtained in response to the following prompts: Tell us something that you like about your hometown. (10 s) Tell us about the climate in your hometown. (10 s) Describe the room that you are calling from. (12 s) Describe your most recent meal. (10 s) Elicited free speech was obtained by asking callers to speak for one minute on any topic of their choice. (60 s) For the extended data, a different protocol was used, as follows: Thank you for calling the Oregon Graduate Institute language database. We are currently recording speech in Hindi. We are studying the different languages of the world. To do this, we need to record samples of speech from fluent speakers of Hindi. Please respond to the following questions and instructions in Hindi only. Please wait for the beep before speaking. This will take about five minutes. Please wait for the beep before speaking. 1. What is your native language? 2. What language do you speak most of the time? 3. What language do you speak at home? 4. How old are you? 5. What is your date of birth? 6. Are you male or female? 7. Were you born and raised in the United States? 8. What city and state did you spend most of your childhood? 9. What is your zip code? 10. What area code are you calling from? 11. What day is today? 12. What time is it? 13. For each of the following descriptions, we will record the first ten seconds of your answer. Begin speaking at the beep. A second beep will indicate when we have finished recording your answer to each question. (pause) 14. Describe the route you take to work or to the store. 15. Tell us something that you like about your hometown. 16. Tell us about the climate in your hometown. 17. Describe the room you are calling from. 18. Describe your most recent meal. 19. We now want you to talk for a longer period of time. We do not care what you say as long as you keep talking. You can tell us anything about yourself, your hobbies and interests, the city that you live in, and the sports that you like. Or you can make up a story, tell a fairy-tale or recite a poem. You will have one minute to speak. We will now give you 10 seconds to think about what to say. Please do not read anything, we would prefer you make something up. (pause) 20. Please begin talking at the beep. You will hear a second beep when you have ten seconds left. 21.You have 10 seconds to complete your story. 22. If you are calling from a touch tone phone, please push the number two button. 23. Would you like to receive a gift certificate for MacDonalds or for TCBY frozen yogurt? 24.Thank you for your participation. If you would like a gift certificate please leave your name, address, and gift certificate selection. Your name and address will be kept confidential.