The Estonian Foreign Accent Corpus (EFAC) is a corpus of Estonian speech recordings by non-native speakers of Estonian, with a native Estonian reference subset. It was created at the Laboratory of Language Technology, Tallinn University of Technology, with funding from the national program Estonian Language Technology (2006-2010; 2011-2017).

EFAC was developed for research on second-language pronunciation, foreign accent characteristics, and speech technology applications such as automatic speech recognition and pronunciation assessment.

Speakers

The corpus contains speakers from a range of first-language backgrounds, including Russian, Finnish, Latvian, German, Lithuanian, French, Japanese, Swedish, Spanish, English, Italian, Hindi, Danish, Dutch, Slovak, Polish, Portuguese, and Azerbaijani. A native Estonian reference subset of 10 male and 10 female speakers was also recorded.

Among the L2 speakers, approximately 60% are female and 40% are male. Speaker ages range from 16 to 67 years. Most participants began learning Estonian between ages 18 and 30, although some started as early as age 7 and others after age 40. Participants had also studied multiple foreign languages, most commonly English, German, or French.

Recording Conditions

Most recordings were made in the TalTech recording studio. Some L2 speakers were recorded at their home universities in Finland (Oulu, Helsinki, Turku), France (Paris), Austria (Vienna), Latvia (Riga), and Lithuania (Vilnius).

Recordings were made with SpeechRecorder using two condenser microphones: a close-talking microphone and a desktop microphone. Audio is stored as high quality WAV files at 44.1 kHz, 16-bit stereo. Each speaker contributed approximately 25 minutes of speech.

Approximately half of the read sentences are segmented and annotated at word and phone levels in Praat.

Each speaker contributed 143 speech items:

Spontaneous speech:
- self-introduction
- 3 picture descriptions
Read speech:
- 137 isolated sentences covering major phonological features of Estonian, including vowel and consonant quantity oppositions, frequent diphthongs and consonant clusters, and palatalisation contrasts
- 2 short stories
Text prompts:
- read-speech prompt texts are provided as UTF-8 encoded TXT files

Directory Structure

The corpus is organized by first-language code and speaker:

  AZ/
    VM/
      *.wav
  DE/
    BJ/
      *.wav
    BK/
      *.wav
  ...

Filenames in each speaker folder follow the format xx_yy_zzz, where xx is the speaker ID, yy is the language code, and zzz is the prompt number. For example, db_en_002 represents speaker db, English as the speaker's L1, and prompt number 002.

This local copy also includes generated metadata files:

metadata.csv: utterance-level metadata in Hugging Face AudioFolder style.
speaker_metadata.csv: speaker-level metadata .

The metadata.csv columns are:

file_name: relative path to the WAV file
ID: utterance identifier
L1: speaker first language as an ISO 639-3 code
speaker: speaker identifier prefixed with the ISO 639-3 L1 code
gender: speaker gender
proficiency: Estonian proficiency level, with native Estonian speakers marked as native
text: normalized transcript text

Statistics

Corpus statistics:

Measure	Value
Utterances with metadata and transcripts	31,835
Speakers in metadata	206
First-language backgrounds in metadata	18
Indexed audio duration	43.49 hours
Average indexed utterance duration	4.92 seconds
Transcript tokens, whitespace-counted	199,278

Indexed utterances by first language

L1	Utterances	Speakers
aze	157	1
dan	311	2
deu	2,720	17
eng	899	5
est	3,116	21
fin	4,548	30
fra	2,006	13
hin	551	3
ita	882	6
jpn	1,020	7
lav	2,927	21
lit	1,709	12
nld	314	2
pol	343	2
rus	8,237	50
slk	291	2
spa	808	5
swe	996	7

Licence and Access

The corpus available under the META-SHARE NonCommercial NoRedistribution NoDerivatives (MS NC-NoReD-ND) license. You may use the corpus non-commercially, but you generally may not redistribute it or share copies onward, and you may not distribute derivatives.

Citation

Please cite:

Meister, Einar; Meister, Lya (2015). Development and use of the Estonian L2 corpus. In Jürgen Trouvain (Ed.), Book of Extended Abstracts. Workshop on Phonetic Learner Corpora, 12 August 2015, Glasgow (Satellite Workshop of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences), 45-47.

@inproceedings{Meister2015EstL2Corpus,
  author    = {Meister, Einar and Meister, Lya},
  title     = {Development and Use of the Estonian L2 Corpus},
  booktitle = {Book of Extended Abstracts. Workshop on Phonetic Learner Corpora, 12 August 2015, Glasgow (Satellite Workshop of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences)},
  editor    = {Trouvain, Jürgen},
  pages     = {45--47},
  year      = {2015}
}

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Estonian Foreign Accent Corpus 1.0