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:
 * 2) * Book excerpts
 * 3) * Broadcast news
 * 4) * Lists of words
 * 5) * Sequences of numbers
 * 6) Spontaneous Speech – which includes:
 * 7) * Dialogs – between two or more people (includes meetings; one such corpus is the KEC);
 * 8) * Narratives – a person telling a story (one such corpus is the Buckeye Corpus);
 * 9) * Map-tasks – one person explains a route on a map to another;
 * 10) * 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.