Spoken language is central to human communication and has significant links to both national identity and individual existence. The structure of spoken language is shaped by many factors. It is structured by the phonological, syntactic and prosodic structure of the language being spoken, by the acoustic enviroment and context in which it is produced---e.g., people speak differently in noisy or quiet environments---and the communication channel through which it travels.
Speech is produced differently by each speaker. Each utterance is produced by a unique vocal tract which assigns its own signature to the signal. Speakers of the same language have different dialects, accents and speaking rates. Their speech patterns are influenced by the physical environment, social context, the perceived social status of the participants, and their emotional and physical state.
Large amounts of annotated speech data are needed to model the affects of these different sources of variability on linguitic units such as phonemes, words, and sequences of words. An axiom of speech research is there are no data like more data. Annotated speech corpora are essential for progress in all areas of spoken language technology. Current recognition techniques require large amounts of training data to perform well on a given task. Speech synthesis systems require the study of large corpora to model natural intonation. Spoken languages systems require large corpora of human-machine conversations to model interactive dialogue.
In response to this need, there are major efforts underway worldwide to collect, annotate and distribute speech corpora in many languages. These corpora allow scientists to study, understand, and model the different sources of variability, and to develop, evaluate and compare speech technologies on a common basis.
Spoken Language Corpora Activities
Recent advances in speech and language recognition are due in part to the availabi