We present a large corpus of Czech parliament plenary sessions. The corpus
consists of approximately 444 hours of speech data and corresponding text
transcriptions. The whole corpus has been segmented to short audio snippets
making it suitable for both training and evaluation of automatic speech
recognition (ASR) systems. The source language of the corpus is Czech, which
makes it a valuable resource for future research as only a few public datasets
are available for the Czech language.
ORTOFON v1 is designed as a representation of authentic spoken Czech used in informal situations (private environment, spontaneity, unpreparedness etc.) in the area of the whole Czech Republic. The corpus is composed of 332 recordings from 2012–2017 and contains 1 014 786 orthographic words (i.e. a total of 1 236 508 tokens including punctuation); a total of 624 different speakers appear in the probes. ORTOFON v1 is fully balanced regarding the basic sociolinguistic speaker categories (gender, age group, level of education and region of childhood residence).
The transcription is linked to the corresponding audio track. Unlike the ORAL-series corpora, the transcription was carried out on two main tiers, orthographic and phonetic, supplemented by an additional metalanguage tier. ORTOFON v1 is lemmatized and morphologically tagged. The (anonymized) transcriptions are provided in the XML Elan Annotation format, audio (with corresponding anonymization beeps) is in uncompressed 16-bit PCM WAV, mono, 16 kHz format.
Another format option of the transcriptions is also available under less restrictive CC BY-NC-SA license at http://hdl.handle.net/11234/1-2580