The EASR corpora of European Portuguese, French, Hungarian and Polish elderly speech

David Hewson
,
Annika Hamalainen
,
Jairo Avelar
,
Silvia Rodrigues
,
Miguel Sales Dias
,
Artur Kolesinski

Microsoft USA
,
University Institute of Lisbon
,
Knowledge Society Association

Research Output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding Conference contribution Peer-review

Abstract

Currently available speech recognisers do not usually work well with elderly speech. This is because several characteristics of speech (e.g. fundamental frequency, jitter, shimmer and harmonic noise ratio) change with age and because the acoustic models used by speech recognisers are typically trained with speech collected from younger adults only. To develop speech-driven applications capable of successfully recognising elderly speech, this type of speech data is needed for training acoustic models from scratch or for adapting acoustic models trained with younger adults’ speech. However, the availability of suitable elderly speech corpora is still very limited. This paper describes an ongoing project to design, collect, transcribe and annotate large elderly speech corpora for four European languages: Portuguese, French, Hungarian and Polish. The Portuguese, French and Polish corpora contain read speech only, whereas the Hungarian corpus also contains spontaneous command and control type of speech. Depending on the language in question, the corpora contain 76 to 205 hours of speech collected from 328 to 986 speakers aged 60 and over. The final corpora will come with manually verified orthographic transcriptions, as well as annotations for filled pauses, noises and damaged words.

Publication Information

Output type

Research Output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding Conference contribution Peer-review

Original language

English

Publication milestones

Published - 31/12/2014

Publication status

Published - 31/12/2014

Publisher

European Language Resources Association

ISBN (Print)

9782951740884

External Publication IDs

handle.net: 10547/623450
Scopus: 84977583701

Host publication title

Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)