flexthink/ljspeech

The LJ Speech Dataset

Version 1.0 July 5, 2017 https://keithito.com/LJ-Speech-Dataset

Overview

This is a public domain speech dataset consisting of 13,100 short audio clips of a single speaker reading passages from 7 non-fiction books. A transcription is provided for each clip. Clips vary in length from 1 to 10 seconds and have a total length of approximately 24 hours.

The texts were published between 1884 and 1964, and are in the public domain. The audio was recorded in 2016-17 by the LibriVox project and is also in the public domain.

The following files provide raw lavels for the train/validation/test split

• train.txt
• valid.txt
• test.txt

Friendly metadata with the split is provided in the following files:

• ljspeech_train.json
• ljspeech_test.json
• ljspeech_valid.json

The JSON files are formatted as follows:

{
    "<sample-id>": {
        "char_raw": "<label text (raw)>",
        "char": "<label text (preprocessed)",
        "phn": "<experimental phoneme annotation obtained using a G2P model",
        "wav": "<relative path to the file"
    }
}

The dataset is also usable as a HuggingFace Arrow dataset: https://huggingface.co/docs/datasets/

FILE FORMAT

Original metadata is provided in metadata.csv. This file consists of one record per line, delimited by the pipe character (0x7c). The fields are:

1. ID: this is the name of the corresponding .wav file
2. Transcription: words spoken by the reader (UTF-8)
3. Normalized Transcription: transcription with numbers, ordinals, and monetary units expanded into full words (UTF-8).

Each audio file is a single-channel 16-bit PCM WAV with a sample rate of 22050 Hz.

Statistics

Total Clips 13,100 Total Words 225,715 Total Characters 1,308,674 Total Duration 23:55:17 Mean Clip Duration 6.57 sec Min Clip Duration 1.11 sec Max Clip Duration 10.10 sec Mean Words per Clip 17.23 Distinct Words 13,821

Miscellaneous

The audio clips range in length from approximately 1 second to 10 seconds. They were segmented automatically based on silences in the recording. Clip boundaries generally align with sentence or clause boundaries, but not always.

The text was matched to the audio manually, and a QA pass was done to ensure that the text accurately matched the words spoken in the audio.

The original LibriVox recordings were distributed as 128 kbps MP3 files. As a result, they may contain artifacts introduced by the MP3 encoding.

The following abbreviations appear in the text. They may be expanded as follows:

 Abbreviation   Expansion
 --------------------------
 Mr.            Mister
 Mrs.           Misess (*)
 Dr.            Doctor
 No.            Number
 St.            Saint
 Co.            Company
 Jr.            Junior
 Maj.           Major
 Gen.           General
 Drs.           Doctors
 Rev.           Reverend
 Lt.            Lieutenant
 Hon.           Honorable
 Sgt.           Sergeant
 Capt.          Captain
 Esq.           Esquire
 Ltd.           Limited
 Col.           Colonel
 Ft.            Fort

 * there's no standard expansion of "Mrs."

19 of the transcriptions contain non-ASCII characters (for example, LJ016-0257 contains "raison d'être").

For more information or to report errors, please email kito@kito.us.

LICENSE

This dataset is in the public domain in the USA (and likely other countries as well). There are no restrictions on its use. For more information, please see: https://librivox.org/pages/public-domain.

CHANGELOG

• 1.0 (July 8, 2017): Initial release

• 1.1 (Feb 19, 2018): Version 1.0 included 30 .wav files with no corresponding annotations in metadata.csv. These have been removed in version 1.1. Thanks to Rafael Valle for spotting this.

CREDITS

This dataset consists of excerpts from the following works:

• Morris, William, et al. Arts and Crafts Essays. 1893.
• Griffiths, Arthur. The Chronicles of Newgate, Vol. 2. 1884.
• Roosevelt, Franklin D. The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 1933-42.
• Harland, Marion. Marion Harland's Cookery for Beginners. 1893.
• Rolt-Wheeler, Francis. The Science - History of the Universe, Vol. 5: Biology. 1910.
• Banks, Edgar J. The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. 1916.
• President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy. Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy.

Recordings by Linda Johnson. Alignment and annotation by Keith Ito. All text, audio, and annotations are in the public domain.

There's no requirement to cite this work, but if you'd like to do so, you can link to: https://keithito.com/LJ-Speech-Dataset

or use the following: @misc{ljspeech17, author = {Keith Ito}, title = {The LJ Speech Dataset}, howpublished = {\url{https://keithito.com/LJ-Speech-Dataset/}}, year = 2017 }