Taiwanese Putonghua Corpus
May 1998

1. Data collection
     This set of data on Taiwanese accented Putonghua (PTH) was recorded in
Taiwan from December 1994 to January 1995. Taiwanese accented PTH refers to
PTH spoken by people who were born in Taiwan and whose first language is
Taiwanese (Southern Min).

2. Recording tools
     The recording tools consisted of a portable DAT (Teac) which recorded
at a 44.1 kHz sampling rate at 16 bits linear quantization. The microphones
were AudioTechnica lapel microphones with a preamp and XLR connection to
the DAT. The XLR helped low noise recordings, and the AudioTechnica
provided widebandwidth, flat response over the speech range of interest,
was unidirectional to minimize cross-talk, and very light in comparison
with standard microphones. Both single-speaker monologues and two-speaker
dialogues were recorded using this system on standard DAT tape.

3. Recording setting
     The recordings were done in ordinary, but quiet rooms. The speakers
were asked in advance to speak in conversation style, without notes, on any
topic they chose, or no topic at all. Most speakers spoke spontaneously and
the topic drifted freely. Some speakers talked about their professional
work in a rather formal way. One speaker (#20, a public health official)
used notes. We consider this variation in speech style a merit of the data.

4. Size of the data
     A total of 40 speakers were recorded. There were 5 two-speaker
dialogues and 30 single-speaker monologues. The dialogues were about 20
minutes each and the monologues were about 10 minutes each. Dialogues were
recorded on two tracks, one for each speaker. Monologues were recorded on
one track.