# Under-Representated Speech Dataset from Open Data: Case Study on the Romanian Language
## 3 Methodology  
The dataset collection process involved three main steps: (a) identification of multimedia platforms that offer open content in the Romanian language; (b) collecting samples of such content from the identified platforms; and (c) manual annotation and transcription of the retrieved samples. First, well-known platforms like YouTube ([[https://www.youtub](https://www.youtub)]([https://www.youtub](https://www.youtub)) e.com/), Vimeo ([[https://vimeo.com/](https://vimeo.com/)]([https://vimeo.com/](https://vimeo.com/))), TikTok ([[https://www.tiktok.com](https://www.tiktok.com)]([https://www.tiktok.com](https://www.tiktok.com))), SoundCloud ([[https://soundcloud.com](https://soundcloud.com)]([https://soundcloud.com](https://soundcloud.com))), and LinguaLibre ([[https://lingualibre.org/wiki/LinguaLibre](https://lingualibre.org/wiki/LinguaLibre)]([https://lingualibre.org/wiki/LinguaLibre](https://lingualibre.org/wiki/LinguaLibre)): Main_Page) are checked for a number of features that are essential for our purposes: the availability of open licenses; search features (based on language, selected license, and features allowing the identification of under-represented speech types); and the actual availability of content that is of interest to our project in terms of language, voice type, recording length, recording quality, etc. The very popular multimedia sharing platform YouTube uses, among others, the Creative Commons license as a standard way for content creators to grant permission to use their work. The user can select this license explicitly; otherwise, the default YouTube license is in force. The Creative Commons license is available as a filter of the keyword search. The platform explicitly mentions that creators should upload only video content they made or they are allowed to use. This makes the users responsible for the content provided. The search interface does not allow language-based search or filtering by speaker characteristics (like gender or age, which must be inferred from the description, profile or video content) but provides a duration filter with three options: \"Under 4 min\", \"4-20 min\", and \"Over 20 min\". The feature is useful since we are interested in collecting recordings primarily in the range 4-20 min, to ensure voice diversity in the dataset. Otherwise, this cannot be ensured through long material covering a few voices. Vimeo has similar features, offering Creative Commons licenses and filtering of the content (for license and duration) but still not filtering for the speaker's characteristics. Compared to YouTube, Vimeo has much less Romanian content, a small number of results with permissive licenses, many results with an unspecified license, and a majority of videos of long duration, which would unbalance the data if used. TikTok's maximum limit duration of 10 min initially made the platform a promising source of content, but further investigation led to discouragement due to the unclear terms of service (under a unique in-house license) and limited filtering options. SoundCloud is a platform that hosts high-quality material, mostly free of noise, with the exception of radio shows which may contain a faint musical background. The Romanian content is mostly recorded by either young or middle-aged people, with no obvious gender predominance. The platform offers Creative Common license material but no filtering by usage license. The tracks are usually long (over an hour, with the exception of short stories), making it very difficult to find short samples of spontaneous speech. LingualLive is a project dedicated to building a multilingual multimedia corpus under free license, offering to the user the possibility to record their own voice and store it together with detailed metadata like the language or gender of the speaker. The interface then provides filters based on all metadata. Unfortunately, the Romanian language is poorly represented at the moment, but we intend to monitor the evolution of the content on the platform since it is, by design, suitable for our purposes.