The IFA Spoken Language Corpus
R.J.J.H. van Son · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2001
The IFA Spoken Language corpus is a free (GPL) database of hand-segmented Dutch speech. It was constructed with off-the-shelf software using speech from 8 speakers (out of 10) in a variety of speaking styles. For a total of 50,000 words (41 minutes/speaker), speech acquisition and preparation took around 3 person-weeks per speaker. Hand segmentation took 1,000 hours of labeling altogether. The asymptotic segmentation speed was about one word, or four boundaries, per minute. An evaluation showed that the Median Absolute Difference of the segment boundaries was 6 ms between labelers, and 4 ms within labelers. Label differences (substitutions, insertions, and deletions) were found in 8% of the segments between labelers and 5% within labelers. Compiled data are available in relational database format for querying with SQL. The IFA Spoken Language corpus is currently in version 1.0. This is the "reference" version and the first I consider consistent enough to be usefull. However, the annotations (labeling) still contains errors. This means that there are inconsistencies in a few percent of the labels (e.g., wrong word assignment of syllables/phonemes, stress errors, etc.). Summary information: Net time in seconds (excluding all pauses) Gender Age ID Recorded sentences (sec) Segmented sentences (sec) F 20 N 3736 2760 F 28 G 4180 3978 F 40 L 3112 2485 F 60 E 4181 3245 M 15 R 2125 1439 M 40 K 2720 1891 M 56 H 2894 2368 M 66 O 3781 1696 Total 26733 19867 7:26 hours 5:31 hours Speech in tokens (total) Gender Recorded Segmented Sentences Words Sentences Words Syllables Phonemes 4F / 4M 6128 73067 4492 51782 74702 187544 The IFA spoken language corpus is constructed using the Praat speech editting and analysis program. All speech material is accessible with praat. The Dutch Language Organization (Nederlandse Taalunie) holds all copyrights (unless explicitely stated otherwise) and makes the complete corpus available under the GNU General Public License (see below).