# Under-Representated Speech Dataset from Open Data: Case Study on the Romanian Language
###### Abstract  
This paper introduces the USPDATRO dataset. This is a speech dataset, in the Romanian language, constructed from open data, focusing on under-represented voice types (children, young and old people, and female voices). The paper covers the methodology behind the dataset construction, specific details regarding the dataset, and evaluation of existing Romanian Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, with different architectures. Results indicate that more under-represented speech content is needed in the training of ASR systems. Our approach can be extended to other low-resourced languages, as long as open data are available. speech dataset; under-represented voices; speech recognition; Romanian language +
Footnote †: journal:  
([[https://european-language-equality.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/ELE_Deliverable_D1_29_Language_Report_Romanian_pdf](https://european-language-equality.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/ELE_Deliverable_D1_29_Language_Report_Romanian_pdf)]([https://european-language-equality.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/ELE_Deliverable_D1_29_Language_Report_Romanian_pdf](https://european-language-equality.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/ELE_Deliverable_D1_29_Language_Report_Romanian_pdf)), accessed on 3 October 2024) [2], speech processing is a domain with fragmentary support, just like corpora development. Although speech corpora is not a separate category in this report, the multimodal corpora (text and speech) are relevant for this type of resource, and this is also evaluated as having fragmentary support. [PERSON] et al. [3] provide an inventory of Romanian speech corpora, which shows that they vary in size (from less than an hour to 280 h), they are mostly non-public, and they contain read or/and spontaneous speech, from various sources. However, the voices represented by these corpora are not described in terms of speaker's gender, age, country, or country region where they live. In what follows, we analyze several Romanian speech corpora, primarily those for which information about the speaker's gender and age is available. Details about their size is given in Table 1. One of the largest speech datasets, RSC [3], also openly available, has 164 voices, with the average age of 24 years (81% of them belonging to the 21-25 age group), male voices being twice as prevalent as female ones. Another corpus for which information about the speakers is available is ROBIN Technical Acquisition Speech Corpus RTASC [4]: it is balanced with respect to gender representation (three male and three female voices, each with the same amount of speech) but imbalanced with respect to age groups: 50% contains voices of speakers in their forties (two female and one male voice), and 33% contains voices of speakers in their thirties (with equal distribution of male and female voices), while the rest contain the voice of a single male speaker in his twenties. The voices in the RoDigits corpus [5] belong to people aged between 20 and 45, with 23 being the average age, while male voices are about 30% more prevalent than female ones. The speakers who volunteered for recording the SWARA corpus [6] are eight males and nine females, with ages between 20 and 35. The RSS corpus [7] contains only one female voice of a woman in her twenties. What we notice is that most of the voices represented are male, while the average age of speakers is in the range 20-35. The RO-GRID [8] dataset contains readings of sequences of six words chosen from a list of alternatives. The first three words were designated as \"keywords\" and the speaker had to utter all combinations (400 in total). The last three words were designated as \"fillers\" and were randomly chosen while creating the sentence. The final corpus contained 6.6 h of audio from 12 speakers. The Romanian Anonymous Speech Corpus (RASC) [9] is a crowd-sourced dataset, gathered through an open interactive platform. The corpus currently contains 4.8 h of transcribed audio.