Speech corpus

A speech corpus (or spoken corpus) is a database of speech audio files and text transcriptions. In speech technology, speech corpora are used, among other things, to create acoustic models (which can then be used with a speech recognition or speaker identification engine). In linguistics, spoken corpora are used to do research into phonetic, conversation analysis, dialectology and other fields.

A corpus is one such database. Corpora is the plural of corpus (i.e. it is many such databases).

There are two types of speech corpora:

1. Read Speech – which includes:
   • Book excerpts
   • Broadcast news
   • Lists of words
   • Sequences of numbers
2. Spontaneous Speech – which includes:
   • Dialogs – between two or more people (includes meetings; one such corpus is the KEC);
   • Narratives – a person telling a story (one such corpus is the Buckeye Corpus);
   • Map-tasks – one person explains a route on a map to another;
   • Appointment-tasks – two people try to find a common meeting time based on individual schedules.

A special kind of speech corpora are non-native speech databases that contain speech with a foreign accent.