ASJ Continuous Speech Corpus for Research
The speech corpora are divided into two types. One is a collection of isolated sentences
which are phonetically balanced. This corpus is composed of 503 Sentences selected byATR Interpreting Telephony Research Laboratories and NEC Corporation. Three
CD-ROMs were produced.
Another is a corpus which constitutes a story. For this purpose, played conversational
speech samples were first recorded onto DAT. They were transcribed into orthographictranscription, which were then rewritten in order to get neater sentences; we deleted
various types of insertions including hesitation, interjection and dialectal expression.
Some phrases were added if necessary, otherwise we tried to keep flavor of original
conversations. Next step is to read and record the rewritten sentences as a story with
one speaker. The scale of this corpus is almost the same size as that of ATR
PB-Sentences. This corpus was also recorded onto three CD-ROMs.
The speech waves were digitized with 16 kHz sampling frequency and 16 bit
quantization. The recording and AD conversion characteristics, including low-pass filter
characteristics (flat up to 6 kHz and -40 dB at 8 kHz recommended) are not necessarily
unified. The creation of the CD-ROM was carried out by the Japan Information
Processing Development Center (JIPDEC). Details are described below.
1. ASJ Continuous Speech Corpus (1): PB Sentences
1.1 Outline
This CD-ROM contains the text and corresponding speech wave of ATR 503
PB-Sentences spoken by 64 speakers, including 30 males and 34 females, making about
9,600 sentences in all. The corpus has been recorded in collaboration with 15
institutions. Speech data were checked by listening and the checklist is stored in a file.
Several data were re-recorded after the check, on account of faltering ormispronunciation. In such cases, the original recordings are stored in another directory
as supplementary data.
1.2 ATR 503 PB Sentences
An information entropy was calculated based on clusters of two phonemes (120 CV's,
227 VC's and 55 VV's, making 402 clusters in al1) and three phonemes (69 CVC's where
C is an unvoiced consonant, 18 CVC's where C is a nasal consonant and 136 VCV's
where C is a semivowel, making 223 clusters in all) on the assumption that they occurindependently. Original 10,196 sample sentences were extracted at random fromnewspapers, magazines, novels, letters, text books, etc. Of these, 503 sentences werechosen in such a way that its information entropy becomes as large as possible, orphonetically balanced. They were sorted so that each set of 50 sentences was alsophonetically balanced.
1.3 Speakers
ATR 503 PB-Sentences are composed of 10 subsets. Subsets of A, B, C, … , I contain
50 sentences and the subset J contains 53 sentences, The sentences in set A werespoken by all speakers, while other sets were spoken by twelve speakers (six males andsix females) as a rule, The details are given in the attached table in a CD-ROM file.
2 ASJ Continuous Speech Corpus (2): Guide Task Sentences
2.1 Outline
This CD-ROM contains a continuous speech (read speech) corpus, a text corpus ofplayed dialogues, and a report. The corpus has been recorded in collaboration with 17
institutions. They are composed of 16 dialogues including 5 sets of geographical guides,
7 sets of tourist guides, 2 sets of music concert guides, one set of passport inquiries andone set of ski tour information. The speech data were checked by listening. The checklist is stored in a file. Several data were re-recorded after the check to correct errors due
to mispronunciations.
2.2 Various Guide Task Continuous Speech Corpus
This corpus consists of continuous speech of ASJ Various Guide Task 1027 Sentences
which were read by 36 speakers, including 18 males and 18 females, making 12,474
sentences in all. The ASJ Various Guide Task Sentences are referred to as ASJ
Simulated Dialogue Sentences in CD-ROM's vol.4 and vol. 5. The texts were obtained byeliminating interjections and erroneous expressions from the original transcriptions ofplayed dialogues between two speakers to whom a task of the dialogue had been given
in advance. Finally, each dialogue text was read by one speaker.
There are two versions of sentences for two sets of the geographical guides, theKanazawa tourist guide and the music concert guide. In the first version, deletions andparticle ellipses were complemented and inverted expressions were corrected to provide
polite expressions. In the second version, deletions and particle ellipses were notcomplemented and inverted expressions were not corrected.
2.3 Speakers
ASJ Various Guide Task Sentences are composed of 16 subsets k, 1, m,..., z, eachcontaining 30 to 141 sentences. Each set was spoken by 10 to 18 speakers and eachspeaker spoke 5 to 9 sets. Eight speakers (4 males and 4 females) of the total 36
speakers in the ASJ Simulated Dialogue corpus are the same as those who spoke ATR
503 PB Sentences corpus (Vol. 1 to 3); other speakers in (Vol. 4 to 6) are all different
from those in (Vol.1 to 3). Details are given in a CD-ROM file.
2.4 Text Corpus of Simulated Dialogue
Played dialogues about various guide tasks are recorded and transcribed incollaboration with 12 institutions. A task had been given in advance to the two speakers
for each dialogue. The transcribed texts of 87 dialogues are included in CD-ROM vol. 6.
The number of sentences in each dialogue is from 40 to 270. The Various Guide Task
Sentences were obtained by eliminating interjections and erroneous expressions fromthe original transcriptions of the played dialogues, considering readability,ill-formedness, and politeness,
6.2.5 Report
The documents related with the corpora in vols.1-6 are included in CD-ROM vol. 6. A

short survey on continuous speech corpora, issues on the played dialogues and thetranscribed texts (definition of tasks, transcription conventions, modification oftranscribed texts into the read texts, etc.), the specifications of the continuous speech
corpus are described.