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\begin{center}

{\large\bf  A TELEPHONE SPEECH DATABASE OF
SPELLED AND SPOKEN NAMES}

\bigskip

{\it Ronald Cole, Krist Roginski and Mark Fanty}
\bigskip

Center for Spoken Language Understanding\\
Oregon Graduate Institute\\
Beaverton, Oregon, 97006
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\bigskip
\bigskip


\begin{center}
{\bf ABSTRACT}
\end{center}

\noindent
This report describes a telephone speech corpus collected at the
Oregon Graduate Institute's Center for Spoken Language Understanding.
Over four thousand people called in response to public requests.  They
were prompted by a recorded voice to say and spell their first and
last names---with and without pauses, to say what city they grew up in
and what city they were calling from, and to answer two yes/no
questions.  In order to collect sufficient instances of each letter,
about 1000 callers also recited the alphabet.  Each call is checked
and transcribed by two people.  In addition, a subset of the calls is
being phonetically labeled.

\begin{center}
{\bf INTRODUCTION}
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A successful telephone speech recognition system 
must deal with variations among speakers, telephone handsets, 
and channel characteristics.  Modeling these
sources of variability requires a corpus of speech samples
provided by many speakers calling from different
locations using different telephones.

We describe the status of a telephone speech corpus 
consisting of spoken letters and names provided by over 4000 speakers. 
This report describes procedures used to acquire the corpus,
procedures used to transcribe and evaluate utterances, and 
the current status of the speech data.

The processed data will be made available to Universities for a
nominal charge as it becomes available.

\begin{center}
{\bf DATA ACQUISITION}
\end{center}

A press release describing our research
project and the need for volunteers produced
newspaper, radio and television coverage.  In addition, we posted
requests for callers on several university bulletin boards and
national computer newsgroups.

Speech was collected using a Gradient Technology Desklab
connected via the SCSI port to a Sun 4/110 workstation.
The device was programmed to answer the phone, play digitized
files requesting the speech samples, and digitize the callers'
response for a designated period of time.
Speech was sampled at 8000 samples per second at 14 bit
resolution.

\bigskip
\noindent {\bf Protocol for First 3000 Calls}

The caller heard the following instructions:
\begin{quote}
  Thank you for calling the OGI speech research laboratory.
  We are developing a computer system to recognize spelled names.
  To do this, we need to record samples of speech from many speakers.
  We will ask you to say and spell your last name, your first name,
  and to say the city and state you grew up in.
  The rest of the call will take about one minute.
  Please wait for the beep before speaking.

\begin{itemize}
\item  What city are you calling from?
\item  What is your last name?
\item  Please spell your last name.
\item  Please spell your last name, with short pauses between letters.
\item  Does your last name contain the letter A as in apple?
\item  What is your first name?
\item  Please spell your first name, with short pauses between letters.
\item  What city and state did you grow up in?
\item  Would you like to receive more information about the results of
      this project?
\end{itemize}

  Thank you for calling.  We appreciate your help.  If you would like
      to receive information about the results of this project, please leave
      your name and address at the tone.
\end{quote}


\bigskip
\noindent {\bf Protocol for Calls 3000--4000}

After 3000 speakers were recorded, the protocol was changed to guarantee
more instances of each letter by asking speakers to recite the English
alphabet.  In addition, three additional words were added to the protocol.  
The new protocol consisted of the following instructions:
\begin{quote}    
    Thank you for calling the OGI speech research laboratory.  We are
    developing a computer system to recognize spelled names.  To do this,
    we need to record samples of speech from many speakers.  
    We will ask you to spell your last name, say where you are calling
    from and where you grew up, and to say the alphabet.
    Please wait for the beep before speaking.

\begin{itemize}
\item    What city are you calling from?
\item    What is your last name?
\item    Please spell your last name.
\item    What city and state did you grow up in?
\item    Please say ``apostrophe''
\item    Please say ``capital''
\item    Please say ``hyphen''
\end{itemize}

    We will now ask you to say the alphabet.  We need you to
    pause briefly between letters, like this:  A B C D E F G.
    You may hang up when you are finished.  Please begin speaking now.
\end{quote}    

\begin{center}
{\bf TRANSCRIPTION AND EVALUATION OF UTTERANCES}
\end{center}

Verification of the corpus consists of (a) listening to each
utterance, (b) providing a precise transcription of what was said, and
(c) making several judgements about the utterances.  Transciption
conventions provide additional information about the utterance.  For
example, when asked to say their last name, many
callers
also spell it.  We distinguish between direct answers to the query and
additional comments by bracketing the latter.

Each utterance is transcribed and evaluated by two different
listeners.  The procedure uses the LYRE interactive graphics
program [1] that allows the transcriber to play selected portions of an
utterance, and access other utterances produced by the same speaker.
For example, if the caller's first or last name is ambiguous, the
transcriber can listen to the spelled version of the same name 
before transcribing it.  The two transcriptions of each utterance
are compared automatically, and all differences are noted and 
resolved.

The transcription conventions include the following
\begin{itemize}
\item lip smacks are transcribed as ``[ls]''
\item breath noise is transcribed as ``[br]''
\item line noise is transcribed as ``[ln]''
\item filled pauses are transcribed as ``[uh]''
\item background noise is transcribed as ``[bn]''
\item coughs are transcribed as ``[cough]''
\item speech which does not directly answer the question 
is placed in brackets
\item words which were cut off have an ``-'' appended (e.g.\ ``my na-'')
\end{itemize}

Transcription and evaluation is proceeding speaker by speaker,
in the order in which the calls were received. The following 
procedure is used to process the calls:
\begin{enumerate}
\item The utterance is optionally chopped to remove lengthy non-speech
intervals before and after the utterance.  At least 100 msec 
is retained before and after the utterance.

\item The utterance is transcribed orthographically to indicate all
speech events (including breath noise).

\item A set of judgements are made about each utterance.  The
listener notes the occurrence of any of the following: 
(a) extraneous speech; (b) environmental noise;
(c) excessive breath noise; (d) did not follow instructions;
(e) line noise; and (f) fluent spelling (no pause between any two
letters during spelling, as seen on the waveform).

\item After individual utterances are processed, the following ``global"
judgments are made: (a) gender (male, female, unknown);
(b) age (child, adult); (c) connection quality (poor, typical);
(d) accent (not noticeable, South, East, other U.S., foreign); and 
(e) intelligibility (poor, typical).

\item Finally, a set of automatic measurements are performed on each
utterance.  These include its duration, the min and max sample, mean,
and 10th and 90th percentile in dB measured over 10 msec windows in
the utterance.  
\end{enumerate}

\begin{center}
{\bf PHONETIC LABELING OF THE UTTERANCES}
\end{center}

A subset of the utterances are being phonetically labelled by hand.
As of this writing, these include 463 responses to the ``what city are you
calling from'' question, 1305 responses to the ``what city and state
did you grow up in'' and 101 responses to the ``what is your last
name'' question.  The set of phonemic labels is similar to that used with the
TIMIT corpus [2,3], with the following distribution.

\medskip

\begin{tabular}{l@{\extracolsep{.2in}}ll@{\extracolsep{.2in}}ll@{\extracolsep{.2in}}lll}
\#h	& 3589	& n	& 1923	& pau	& 1687\\
ah	& 1434  & l	& 1212	& s	& 1134\\
ih	& 1051	& k	& 956 	& tcl	& 837\\
ao-r	& 763	& t	& 750	& ae	& 696 \\
kcl	& 682	& eh	& 668	& iy	& 667\\
q	& 579	& ow	& 577	& m	& 568\\
d	& 529	& dcl	& 484	& ao	& 464\\
ax	& 453	& er	& 441	& b	&440\\
uw	& 435	& r	& 414	& y	&412\\
g	& 400	& w	& 393	& v	& 385\\
gcl	& 355	& ls	& 341	& p	& 334\\
ix	& 313	& f	& 303	& aa	&274 \\
ey	& 269	& sh	& 266	& br	&236\\
bcl	& 219	& ng	& 217	& ay	& 205\\
hh	& 191	& z	& 183	& glot	& 175\\
dx	& 165	& nx	&156	& pcl	&153 \\
gx	& 143	& ln	& 123	& el	&122\\
ch	& 110	& jh	& 106	& uh	& 79\\
th	&71	& cl	&61	& oy	& 61\\
pv	& 51	& ax-h	&49	& unk	&37\\
en	& 36	& aw	& 27	& dh	&20\\
hv	& 17	& ns	& 13	& zh	& 2
\end{tabular}

\bigskip
\noindent
Several labels were added to the standard set:

\bigskip
\begin{tabular}{l l}
ao-r & r-sound in Portland, York, California \\
ls & lip smack \\
ln & line noise \\
br & breath noise \\
glot & glottalization \\
pv & prevoicing \\
ns & non-speech sound \\
\end{tabular}

\bigskip
\noindent
The utterances are labeled, then printouts of the labels,  time aligned
with the speech spectrogram, are checked by an expert spectrogram
reader to catch obvious mistakes.

\begin{center}
{\bf CURRENT STATUS}
\end{center}

There are currently
2,542 completed  calls
(1268 female, 1238 male and 22 unknown gender).
There are a total of 2,500 last names (1,902 different last names);
1,495 first names (651 different first names); 886 different
hometown cities; and 423 different ``callfrom'' cities.
Some corpus statistics are provided below:

\begin{center}
{\bf STATISTICS}
\end{center}

\bigskip
\noindent {\bf Ten Most Common \ldots}

\begin{tabbing}
CityNamesGohere \= 000 spacespace \= namesgohere \= 000 \kill
{\bf First names}  \> \> {\bf Last Names }\\
John 	\> 44 \> Smith 		\> 24\\
David 	\> 36 \> Johnson 	\> 21 \\
James 	\> 21 \> Brown 		\> 12 \\
Michael	\> 20 \> Miller 	\> 11 \\
Robert 	\> 20 \> White		\> 10 \\
Mary 	\> 18 \> Young 		\> 9 \\
Steve 	\> 16 \> Jones 		\> 9 \\
Barbara \> 14 \> Bell 		\> 9 \\
Thomas 	\> 14 \> Anderson 	\> 8 \\
Mark 	\> 14 \> Clark		\> 8\\
\\

{\bf City called from} \> \> {\bf Hometown}\\
Portland	\> 475 \> Portland 	\> 199 \\
Seattle 	\> 431 \> Seattle 	\> 160 \\
Beaverton 	\> 74 \> Chicago 	\> 35 \\
Bellevue	\> 49 \> Vancouver 	\> 27 \\
Denver 		\> 44 \> Los Angeles 	\> 25 \\ 
Salem		\> 42 \> New York 	\> 25 \\ 
Vancouver 	\> 40 \> Denver 	\> 25 \\
Pittsburgh 	\> 37 \> Minneapolis 	\> 22 \\
Boston 		\> 37 \> Boston 	\> 18 \\
Hillsboro 	\> 35 \> Salem 		\> 17\\
\\

{\bf Responses of Yes/No Questions}\\
            yes \>  1416 \\
             no \>  1006 \\
    yes i would \>   76 \\
           sure \>   51 \\
   no thankyou \>   49 \\
      yes please \>   36 \\
      yes it does \>   35 \\
    no it does not \>   15 \\
           yeah \>    9 \\
    yes thank you \>    5 
\end{tabbing}

\bigskip
\noindent {\bf Distribution of Letters in Last Names}

\begin{tabbing}
llll \= numbr space \= llll \= numbr space \= llll \= number space  \kill\\
e  \> 1023 \> h \> 402 \> w \> 172 \nopagebreak \\
r  \> 808 \> m  \> 319 \> p \> 171 \\
a  \> 787 \> c  \> 308 \> y \> 169\\
n  \> 738 \> d  \> 285 \> f \> 119\\
o  \> 673 \> b  \> 254 \> v \> 72\\
s  \> 633 \> k  \> 226 \> j \> 61\\
l  \> 606 \> u  \> 215 \> z \> 51\\
i  \> 487 \> g  \> 184 \> x \> 22\\
t  \> 480 \>    \>     \> q  \> 9 \nopagebreak \\
\end{tabbing}

\begin{center}
{\bf ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS}
\end{center}
Research supported by U.S. WEST, NSF and ONR.


\begin{center}
{\bf BIBLIOGRAPHY}
\end{center}

\noindent\hangindent=20pt\hangafter=1
\hbox to 20pt{[1]}Fanty, M., Pochmara, J. and R. Cole,
``An interactive environment for speech recognition research,''
ICSLP 92.

\noindent\hangindent=20pt\hangafter=1
\hbox to 20pt{[2]}Lamel, L., Kassel, R. and S. Seneff,
``"Speech Database Development:  Design and Analysis of
the Acoustic-Phonetic Corpus",
Proceedings of the DARPA Speech Recognition Workshop, pp. 100--110,
1986. 

\noindent\hangindent=20pt\hangafter=1
\hbox to 20pt{[3]}Fisher, W., Doddington, G., and K. Goudie-Marshall, 
``The DARPA Speech Recognition Research Database: Specification and Status.",
Proceedings of the DARPA Speech Recognition Workshop, pp. 93--100,
1986. 
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