  In this paper, we present AISHELL-4, a sizable real-recorded Mandarin speech
dataset collected by 8-channel circular microphone array for speech processing
in conference scenario. The dataset consists of 211 recorded meeting sessions,
each containing 4 to 8 speakers, with a total length of 118 hours. This dataset
aims to bride the advanced research on multi-speaker processing and the
practical application scenario in three aspects. With real recorded meetings,
AISHELL-4 provides realistic acoustics and rich natural speech characteristics
in conversation such as short pause, speech overlap, quick speaker turn, noise,
etc. Meanwhile, the accurate transcription and speaker voice activity are
provided for each meeting in AISHELL-4. This allows the researchers to explore
different aspects in meeting processing, ranging from individual tasks such as
speech front-end processing, speech recognition and speaker diarization, to
multi-modality modeling and joint optimization of relevant tasks. Given most
open source dataset for multi-speaker tasks are in English, AISHELL-4 is the
only Mandarin dataset for conversation speech, providing additional value for
data diversity in speech community.
