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Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals -
Services Schiel
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BASSS Speech Corpora Production
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BAS Services Schiel (BASSS) has a long
experience in the efficient production of technical
speech corpora.
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What is a speech corpus?
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A speech corpus is a collection of controlled
speech recordings
together with their respective annotations and meta
information.
There exists a wide
range of possible parameters when specifying a new speech
corpus, such as: technical format and quality, surrounding
acoustics, linguistic/situational context, speaker profiles,
content, background noise, purpose of the corpus (ASR,
synthesis etc.).
Speech corpora are needed for a number of empirical methods in
speech processing such as: Automatic Speech Recognition,
Speaker Verification/Recognition, Concatenative Speech
Synthesis. Furthermore, companies that are planing to
include such technologies into their products are in need of
specific test corpora to evaluate their developed/acquired
technology.
During the last decade the BAS has
produced most of the existing German speech corpora (see the
BAS online
catalogue for details). The founders of BASSS have
compiled these experiences into a
recommendation for the
production of speech corpora which is used
as a guideline for our
ongoing and future corpora productions.
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What can BASSS do for you?
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BASSS offers a full support on all stages of the speech
corpora production process: Specification, Preparation,
Speaker Recruitment, Pre-Validation,
Recording, Post-processing, Annotation,
Distribution, Validation.
In some cases our customers choose to have the full control
over parts of the process (e.g. for legal reasons), while
other parts are contracted to BASSS. For example, the
specification and the
speaker recruitment are provided by
BASSS, the actual recordings are performend by the
customer (because of insurance issues) while the
orthographic transliteration, the segmentation and
labeling
and the postprocessing are again done by BASSS
Since BASSS acts as a
private company and is not represented by the university,
contracted legal restrictions and non-disclosure
agreements about the contents of the speech corpora are possible.
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Speaker Database
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BASSS maintains a large speaker database of all
speakers that have ever participated in a BAS corpora
production. This enables us to recruit new speakers groups
very effectively. Our response rate to calls to our registered
speakers is about 34% (which is a very high value compared to
the response rate of 1% by unsolicitated mail).
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Recording and Annotation Techniques
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BASSS has developed a number of widely used recording
and annotation techniques, file formats and quality assurance
methods
that enable us to minimize logistic efforts and errors
during a speech corpora production. Please refer to our
scientific
publications for a closer look at WebTranscribe,
MAUS and SpeechRecorder.
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Copyright 2005 BAS Services Schiel
Impressum: Florian Schiel, Moltkestr. 1, D-80803 München,
Germany, schiel@bas-services.de
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