The corpus consists of transcribed recordings from the Czech political discussion broadcast “Otázky Václava Moravce“. It contains 35 hours of speech and corresponding word-by-word transcriptions, including the transcription of some non-speech events. Speakers’ names are also assigned to corresponding segments. The resulting corpus is suitable for both acoustic model training for ASR purposes and training of speaker identification and/or verification systems. The archive contains 16 sound files (WAV PCM, 16-bit, 48 kHz, mono) and transcriptions in XML-based standard Transcriber format (http://trans.sourceforge.net)
The ParCzech 3.0 corpus is the third version of ParCzech consisting of stenographic protocols that record the Chamber of Deputies’ meetings held in the 7th term (2013-2017) and the current 8th term (2017-Mar 2021). The protocols are provided in their original HTML format, Parla-CLARIN TEI format, and the format suitable for Automatic Speech Recognition. The corpus is automatically enriched with the morphological, syntactic, and named-entity annotations using the procedures UDPipe 2 and NameTag 2. The audio files are aligned with the texts in the annotated TEI files.
PDTSC 1.0 is a multi-purpose corpus of spoken language. 768,888 tokens, 73,374 sentences and 7,324 minutes of spontaneous dialog speech have been recorded, transcribed and edited in several interlinked layers: audio recordings, automatic and manual transcription and manually reconstructed text.
PDTSC 1.0 is a delayed release of data annotated in 2012. It is an update of Prague Dependency Treebank of Spoken Language (PDTSL) 0.5 (published in 2009). In 2017, Prague Dependency Treebank of Spoken Czech (PDTSC) 2.0 was published as an update of PDTSC 1.0.
The first edition of a speech corpus with a speech reconstruction layer (edited transcript).
The project of speech reconstruction of Czech and English has been started at UFAL together with the PIRE project in 2005, and has gradually grown from ideas to (first) annotation specification, annotation software and actual annotation. It is part of the Prague Dependency Treebank family of annotated corpus resources and tools, to which it adds the spoken language layer(s). and LC536; MSM0021620838; IST-034344; ME838
ROMi represents a specific subcorpus of CZESL (Czech as a Second Language). It collects examples of language use, both spoken and written, of Czech Romani children and teen-agers. The range of materials exceeds 1,5 million words.
Language Material
The material presents uses of spoken language by language-specific group of Romani speakers using Czech as their first language. However, this form of the language is specifically different from Czech as used by the Czech-speaking majority, both on the spoken and secondarily on the written level. It concerns the so-called Romani ethnolect of Czech, i.e. a variety of Czech used by Romani communities mainly in the Czech Republic. We may detect obvious influence of Romani, Slovak and Hungarian. Furthermore, many of the recorded speakers live in social exclusion and thus their language production is influenced by both factors, i.e. by Romani ethnolect and social exclusion.
The language material was collected in the years 2009 – 2012 under the Education for Competitiveness Operational Programme, within the framework of the project Innovations of Czech as a Second Language Education collaboratively by the Technical University of Liberec and the Institute of Czech Language and Theory of Communication, Faculty of Arts, Charles University. The language material was processed with support of Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics - project LINDAT-Clarin.
It concerns 110 recordings obtained in various environments – the collection of material took place both in schools and also in several non-profit organizations offering leisure time activities to Romani students. Apart from the school setting, the recordings thus come from the environment of extracurricular activities, sport matches and households. Both the respondents and the collectors are Romani. The samples were acquired in all regions of the Czech Republic, although the majority of recordings were obtained in the Central Bohemia, South Bohemia, Ústí and Vysočina Region. The age of the respondents ranges from 12 to 28 years. The collected samples are also accompanied by metadata relating to the following areas:
The collected samples are accompanied by metadata relating to the following areas:
• The place of origin (the place of collection, the size of the residence and dialect area, region, environment (school, extracurricular, private); socially excluded locality.
• The circumstances of the collection expressing the extent of control exercised by the collector (topic assigned/non-assigned).
• The respondent (the age of the student; class/year; sex; type of the school; subjective knowledge of Romani; first language – the one the student considers to be his first; communicative environment in the family – which language(s) is/are used for communication in the family.
• The place of data collection – in the case of schools metadata comprise characteristics of the type of school (primary, for students with special needs, remedial, vocational, secondary), the founder (state, church, private organisation), in the case of the place of individual collection of data you may find organisation, interest group markings, etc.
• The collector (the abbreviation of collector´s name and his work area, in some cases also his age).
Delimiting the group of respondents
The respondents are constituted by students of primary schools, schools for students with special needs, secondary schools and by teenagers who have just completed the compulsory education. For the purposes of the language material collection, those students who consider themselves to be Romani or who are considered Romani by others were included to the sample. Moreover, a language criterion was added to this definition - thus those students in whose families Romani is spoken at home were also included. Active knowledge of the Romani language was not required since hardly a third of Romani children living in the Czech Republic nowadays is competent in this language.
Ethical aspects of the data collection and processing
As regards the content of the language material, it places demands on the data processing from the ethical point of view. Frequently, the texts and recordings feature highly interesting material; the respondents talk about their life stories fully distant or inconceivable for the social majority. During the transcription process, all materials are anonymized and identification data are removed.
Field Research
When dealing with the environment threatened by social exclusion, it is highly important to consider especially the needs and opportunities of the group members as well as the needs of those individuals, who find themselves or work in such an environment. During the developmental process of the corpus, we became decidedly convinced that it is necessary to accommodate different demands on material quality of texts and recordings and not to overburden both the respondents and the collectors with limiting or impossible requirements. Therefore, the corpus comprises several recordings of lower technical quality which were acquired in the presence of other persons, with the television turned on, etc. Firstly, the recordings would not even have come into existence under different circumstances – it is natural that the interviewing of younger children was taking place directly in their households, in the presence of their parents. Secondly, the recordings would have been made, yet they would have been influenced by the unnaturalness of the situation, consequently affecting the language material. Apart from the interviews with younger children, it regards especially those conversations between the collectros and their peers, e.g. inside leisure time clubs.
Characteristics of the recordings
The collected recordings come both from the school environment (especially conversations of teacher assistants with individual students) and from the leisure time facilities (interest groups, after-school tutoring). In most cases it concerns conversations of the collector and the individual, alternatively a pair of respondents. The length of the recordings differs, although the majority ranges from 20 to 35 minutes. A single recording approximately contains 2 495 words. The quality of recordings is influenced by the limits of field-utilizable technologies and the effort to increase authenticity to the maximum.
Transcription of the recordings
The rules for transcription of the recordings are based on similar ones designed for SCHOLA corpus. Transcriptions are carried out by the means of folkloristic transcription, i.e. the closest to the written record, especially adapted for the purposes of computational processing, following the practice established in the Czech National Corpus. The transcription is performed with the help of the Transcriber programme, which connects the sound and graphic track.
This dataset can serve as a training and evaluation corpus for the task of training keyword detection with speaker direction estimation (keyword direction of arrival - KWDOA).
It was created by processing the existing Speech Commands dataset [1] with the PyroomAcoustics library so that the resulting speech recordings simulate the usage of a circular microphone array with 4 microphones having a distance of 57 mm between adjacent microphones. Such design of a simulated microphone array was chosen in order to match the existing physical microphone array from the Seeeduino series.
[1] Warden, Pete. “Speech Commands: A Dataset for Limited-Vocabulary Speech Recognition.” ArXiv.org, 2018, arxiv.org/abs/1804.03209
Our Laboratory of Artificial Neural Network Applications (LANNA) in the Czech Technical University in Prague (head of the laboratory is professor Jana Tučková) collaborates on a project with the Department of Paediatric Neurology, 2nd Faculty of Medicine of Charles University in Prague and with the Motol University Hospital (head of clinic is professor Vladimír Komárek), which focuses on the study of children with SLI.
The speech database contains two subgroups of recordings of children's speech from different types of speakers. The first subgroup (healthy) consists of recordings of children without speech disorders; the second subgroup (patients) consists of recordings of children with SLI. These children have different degrees of severity (1 – mild, 2 – moderate, and 3 – severe). The speech therapists and specialists from Motol Hospital decided upon this classification. The children’s speech was recorded in the period 2003-2013. These databases were commonly created in a schoolroom or a speech therapist’s consulting room, in the presence of surrounding background noise. This situation simulates the natural environment in which the children live, and is important for capturing the normal behavior of children. The database of healthy children’s speech was created as a referential database for the computer processing of children’s speech. It was recorded on the SONY digital Dictaphone (sampling frequency, fs = 16 kHz, 16-bit resolution in stereo mode in the standardized wav format) and on the MD SONY MZ-N710 (sampling frequency, fs = 44.1 kHz, 16-bit resolution in stereo mode in the standardized wav format). The corpus was recorded in the natural environment of a schoolroom and in a clinic. This subgroup contains a total of 44 native Czech participants (15 boys, 29 girls) aged 4 to 12 years, and was recorded during the period 2003–2005. The database of children with SLI was recorded in a private speech therapist’s office. The children’s speech is captured by means of a SHURE lapel microphone using the solution by the company AVID (MBox – USB AD/DA converter and ProTools LE software) on an Apple laptop (iBook G4). The sound recordings are saved in the standardized wav format. The sampling frequency is set to 44.1 kHz with 16-bit resolution in mono mode. This subgroup contains a total of 54 native Czech participants (35 boys, 19 girls) aged 6 to 12 years, and was recorded during the period 2009–2013. This package contains wav data sets for development and testing methods for detection children with SLI.
Software pack:
FORANA - was developed the original software FORANA for formants analysis. It is based on the MATLAB programming environment. The development of this software was mainly driven by the need to have the ability to complete formant analysis correctly and full automation of the process of extracting formants from the recorded speech signals. Development of this application is still running. Software was developed in the LANNA at CTU FEE in Prague.
LABELING - the program LABELING is used for segmentation of the speech signal. It is a part of SOMLab program system. Software was developed in the LANNA at CTU FEE in Prague.
PRAAT - is an acoustic analysis software. The Praat program was created by Paul Boersma and David Weenink of the Institute of Phonetics Sciences of the University of Amsterdam. Home page: http://www.praat.org or http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/.
Talks of Karel Makoň given to his friends in the course of late sixties through early nineties of the 20th century. The topic is mostly christian mysticism.
Talks of Karel Makoň given to his friends in the course of late sixties through early nineties of the 20th century. The topic is mostly christian mysticism.
The database actually contains two sets of recordings, both recorded in the moving or stationary vehicles (passenger cars or trucks). All data were recorded within the project “Intelligent Electronic Record of the Operation and Vehicle Performance” whose aim is to develop a voice-operated software for registering the vehicle operation data.
The first part (full_noises.zip) consists of relatively long recordings from the vehicle cabin, containing spontaneous speech from the vehicle crew. The recordings are accompanied with detailed transcripts in the Transcriber XML-based format (.trs). Due to the recording settings, the audio contains many different noises, only sparsely interspersed with speech. As such, the set is suitable for robust estimation of the voice activity detector parameters.
The second set (prompts.zip) consists of short prompts that were recorded in the controlled setting – the speakers either answered simple questions or they repeated commands and short phrases. The prompts were recorded by 26 different speakers. Each speaker recorded at least two sessions (with identical set of prompts) – first in stationary vehicle, with low level of noise (those recordings are marked by –A_ in the file name) and second while actually driving the car (marked by –B_ or, since several speakers recorded 3 sessions, by –C_). The recordings from this set are suitable mostly for training of the robust domain-specific speech recognizer and also ASR test purposes.