ASJ Continuous Speech Corpus－ Japanese Newspaper Article Sentences (JNAS) －June 1997
(revised Nov. 2014)
Shuichi ITAHASHI

1Outline
This corpus consists of 6 DVD-Rs. It contains speech recordings and theirorthographic transcriptions of 306 speakers (153 males and females each) reading
excerpts from the Mainichi Newspaper and the ATR 503 PB-Sentences. All utterancesand sentences are in the Japanese language.
We prepared 155 text sets. Each set consists of about 100 sentences from the Mainichi
Newspaper. As a general rule, each text set was read by one male and one female. Everyspeaker also read any subset of the ATR 503 PB-Sentences (about 50 sentences for eachsubset). That is, this corpus contains utterances of about 45,000 sentences as a wholewith all speakers reading about 150 sentences each.
Each utterance was recorded with two microphones: a head-set microphone (allrecoding sites used Sennheiser HMD410/HMD25-1 or the equivalent) and a desk-top
microphone of different types at each site (Sanken, Sony, and so on). These
two-microphone data were stored into separate files and have a parallel directory
structure in the DVD-R directories; three of the discs (Vol.1 through Vol.3) contain thehead-set-microphone data and the other (Vol.4 through Vol.6) the desk-top-microphonedata.
The speech waves were sampled at 16 kHz and quantized into 16 bits. They are stored
in the wav file format.
The corpus includes text sets for reading, orthographic transcriptions of the speech
data and the bigram language models for the Mainichi Newspaper articles from which
the prompting text was selected. These materials are contained in Vol.1 and Vol.4.
The Speech Database Committee of the Acoustical Society of Japan, established inJuly 1990, has discussed the design and creation of this corpus, which has beenrecorded in collaboration with 39 institutions. The recording and AD conversion
characteristics, including low-pass filter characteristics, are not necessarily unified.

2Sentences of the Mainichi Newspaper Articles
The Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Database Working Group of theInformation Processing Society of Japan established in November, 1995, selected 155
text sets for reading, using articles of the Mainichi Newspaper issued during 1991-1994.
A bigram language model was estimated from the articles of 45 months with theirmorphological information taken from RWCP text corpus (RWC-DB-TEXT-95-1) which
was automatically generated with a morphological analyzer. The CMU SLP toolkit wasused for the estimation. Sentences in the articles for three months were classified into
30 categories based on the bigram model. Each category is characterized by thesentence length (2 types), the vocabulary size (5 types) and perplexity (3 types).
A statistically controlled text set consists of 90 sentences (SC-sentences) collectedfrom the categories according to Table 1 and about 10 connected sentences taken from afew paragraphs. 150 text sets of controlled sentences (about 100 sentences each) wereprepared. The details of the sentence id in each text set and its category are shown in
Table 2.
Table 1. The number of SC-sentences collected from each category
LENGTH=NORMALLENGTH=LONG

PERP=LOWPERP=MID

PERP=HIGHPERP=LOWPERP=MID

PERP=HIGH

VOC=MID

262

131

VOC=MID+

262131

VOC=LARGE

4124262

VOC=LARGE+

262131

VOC=LARGE++

2621

3

1

VOC=MID:

5k voc. without an unknown word

VOC=MID+:

5k voc. with one unknown word

LENGTH=NORMAL:

5-19 morphemes

LENGTH=LONG:

20-39 morphemes

PERP=LOW:0<PERP=MID:

40 <= perplexity < 85

PERP=HIGH:

85 <= perplexity < 400

VOC=LARGE:

perplexity < 40

20k voc. without an unknown word

VOC=LARGE+:

20k voc. with one unknown word

VOC=LARGE++:

20k voc. with two or more unknown words

LENGTH=NORMAL:

5-29 morphemes

LENGTH=LONG:

30-39 morphemes

PERP=LOW:0<PERP=MID:70 <= perplexity < 130

perplexity < 70

PERP=HIGH:

130 <= perplexity < 400Table 2. The details of the sentence id in each text set and its category
sentence-id (#)

vocab-classlength-classperplexity-classLOW

1- 2(2)MID

NORMAL

3- 8(6)MID

NORMAL

MID

9-10 (2)MID

NORMAL

HIGH

11 (1)

MID

LONG

LOW

12-14 (3)

MID

LONG

MID

15 (1)

MID

LONG

HIGH

16-17 (2)MID+

NORMALLOW

18-23 (6)MID+

NORMAL

MID

24-25 (2)MID+

NORMAL

HIGH

26 (1)

MID+

LONG

LOW

27-29 (3)

MID+

LONG

MID

30 (1)

MID+

LONG

HIGH

31-34 (4)LARGE

NORMAL

LOW

35-46 (12)LARGE

NORMAL

MID

47-50 (4)LARGE

NORMAL

HIGH

51-52 (2)

LARGE

LONG

LOW

53-58 (6)

LARGE

LONG

MID

59-60 (2)

LARGE

LONG

HIGH

61-62 (2)LARGE+NORMAL

LOW

63-68 (6)LARGE+NORMAL

MID

69-70 (2)LARGE+NORMALHIGH

71 (1)LARGE+

LONG

LOW

72-74 (3)LARGE+

LONG

MID

75(1)

LARGE+LONG

HIGH

76-77 (2)LARGE++NORMALLOW

78-83 (6)LARGE++NORMAL

MID

84-85 (2)LARGE++NORMALHIGH

86 (1)LARGE++LONG

LOW

87-89 (3)LARGE++

LONG

MID

90 (1)LARGE++

LONG

HIGH

91-(10+)(PARAGRAPH)

Five other text sets are made up of connected sentences chosen from someparagraphs.
The corpus includes two kinds of text sets for reading using newspaper articles. One
is the Japanese orthographic text with ruby, used as a prompting text for reading, in theTeX format and its compiled PDF format. The other is the Kanji, Kana, Romaji andKanji with ruby text.

3

ATR 503 PB-Sentences
These PB-sentences were chosen by ATR Interpreting Telephony ResearchLaboratories. Entropy was calculated based on the clusters of two phonemes (120 CV's,
227 VC's and 55 VV's, making 402 clusters in all) 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. 10,196 original sample sentences were extracted at random fromnewspapers, magazines, novels, letters, text books, etc. Of these, 503 PB sentences werechosen to maximize the entropy. They were sorted so that each set of 50 sentences also
be phonetically balanced.
This corpus includes the plain text files of Kanji, Kana and Romaji format.

4

Orthographic transcription
The corpus contains the plain text files of Kanji, Kana and Romaji format that

represents pronunciation of each utterance. Each sentence was modified to correctlytranscribe recorded utterances according to the check reports from the recording sites.

5

Update Information
28 Nov. 2014

Speech files converted to wav format, flawed speech files resolved,
the ruby of text sets for reading and transcriptions corrected,
test-set lists added and all documents revised.

10 March 2009

The NIST SPHERE headers removed from speech files.

17 March 2008

Bug information added (only in Japanese).

22 March 2006

Compressed speech files extracted and converted to DVD-Rs.

6

Copyright information

Copyright holders of each part of this corpus are the following.
DATA

COPYRIGHT HOLDER

Speech wave data

The Acoustical Society of Japan (1997)

Newspaper article

The Mainichi Newspapers (1991-1994)

Morphological data and pronunciationof newspaper article

Real World Computing Partnership (1996)

ATR 503 PB-Sentences

ATR Interpreting Telephony
Research Laboratories (1988)

Sources of each part of this corpus are the following.
DATASOURCES

Newspaper article

CD-Mainichi 1991-1994(Nichigai Associates, Inc.)

Morphological data and pronunciationof newspaper article

RWC Text Database Ver.1
RWC-DB-TEXT-95-1( Real World Computing Partnership)[Notice](1) If you use only the data other than speech waves, you need to obtainthe copyright holder's permission.
(2) A sentence extracted from newspaper articles does not retain its original
sense in the context.

ASJ Continuous Speech Corpus--- Japanese Newspaper Article Sentences (JNAS) --Editor:

Speech Database Committee, Acoustical Society of Japan

Publisher: Acoustical Society of Japan
Nakaura 5th-Bldg., 2-18-20 Sotokanda, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 101-0021, Japan

Assisted by:
Chiba University
Doshisha University
Kyoto Institute of Technology
Kyoto University
Nagoya University
Nara Institute of Science and Technology
Osaka University
Ryukoku University
Shinshu University
Sizuoka University
Teikyo University of Science & Technology
Tohoku University
Toyohashi University of Technology
University of Electro-Communications
University of Tokyo
University of Tsukuba
Waseda University
Yamagata University
Yamanashi University
Electrotechnical Laboratory

ATR Interpreting Telecommunications
Research Laboratories
Canon Inc.
Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd.
Hitachi, Ltd.
Kokusai Denshin Denwa Co., Ltd.
Matsushita Research Institute Tokyo, Inc.
Meidensha Corporation
Mitsubishi Electric Corporation
NEC Corporation
NTT Basic Research Laboratories
NTT Data Corporation
NTT Human Interface Laboratories- Furui Research Laboratory- Speech and Acoustics Laboratory
Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd.
Ricoh Co., Ltd.
Sanyo Electric Co., Ltd.
Sharp Corporation
Sony Corporation
Toshiba Corporation(DVD version) Produced by: Media Drive Corporation(Revised version) Produced by: Speech Resources Consortium (NII-SRC)

Acknowledgements:
The prompting texts and the bigram language models of the Mainichi Newspaper article
sentences were prepared by the Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Database Working
Group, Special Interest Group of Spoken Language Processing, Information Processing
Society of Japan.
We used the NIST SPHERE package for attaching a header to wave files. The NISTSPHERE package was implemented by the Spoken Natural Language Processing Group,
National Institute of Standards and Technology, U.S.A.
We would like to thank all the groups and people above.