H94-1008
Contents
1. Tell us something that you like about your hometown Tell us about the climate in your hometown Describe the room that you are calling from e Describe your most recent meal In addition unconstrained speech was obtained by asking callers to speak for 1 minute on any topic of their choice Each utterance was listened to by a native speaker of the lan guage to verify that the caller responded appropriately The native speaker also made judgments concerning the caller s gender the caller s age and the line quality The enhanced corpus is augmented with a 200 Hindi calls b speech files that were collected during the original col lection but were not included in the original distribution and c time aligned phonetic transcriptions of over five hours of speech up to 50 sec per call in six languages English Japanese German Spanish Hindi and Mandarin For the broad phonetic transcription we have adopted the World bet labeling scheme a set of orthographic symbols for multi language transcription that correspond to IPA symbols 5 The rationale for using Worldbet and the inventory of sym bols for each language is provided in 1 2 3 Stories Corpus Collection for the OGI Multi Language Corpus produced ad ditional calls from English speakers not included in the Multi Language Corpus The Stories Corpus consists of up to 50 sec of spontaneous speech hereafter stories from 692 English calls All 6922. each prompt please wait for the beep before responding First we would like to ask a couple of questions to help us characterize your speaking patterns What is your native language In what city or state did hood For the rest of this call we will say a phrase and ask you to repeat it For example we would say read this text and you would respond by saying read this text Please say the phrase as if you were giving a command to a computer you spend most of your child play previous message again cancel my ten AM appointment make a meeting for today what is my street address quit forward this message to my wife set up a call with firstname and firstname conference call lastname and lastname who is at work stop what is the area code for this state add my son to the phone book remove number digit from the directory hello what are my messages skip the next name help good bye please send a car from the city dial number delete my email tomorrow cancel read this text correct my balance call my daughter at eleven pm on day erase all information no record extended phonebook get my office transfer all calls to home at twelve oclock use voice record urgent message yes find the operator call firstname dial lastname phone firstname call number phone number Thank you for your participation If you would like to receive a gift certificate for either M
3. markings Time aligned word level transcription provides the same ortho graphic transcription augmented with time alignment mark ings Time aligned phonetic transcription involves aligning phonetic symbols to the acoustic signal A precise description of the conventions used for all levels of labeling including a complete list of all phonetic labels for each language is presented in the CSLU conventions document 1 Transcription Reliability We are conducting experiments to determine the level of agreement among labelers In these experiments CSLU staff and professional phoneticians are using Worldbet 5 to transcribe the same intervals of speech Initial results for English indicate overall agreement of ap proximately 80 across all labels ranging from approxi mately 70 for vowels to greater than 90 for stops and nasals Speech Tools The OGI Speech Tools support data ma nipulation analysis and display 2 All corpus development activities are performed using these tools They were devel oped at CSLU then made portable and documented for dis tribution with support from NSF The tools have been made available to the research community through anonymous ftp 2 CORPORA The first three corpora described in this section are consid ered to be complete and are now available from CSLU They were collected over an analog telephone line using a Gradient Technology Desklab connected via the SCSI port to a work station The dat
4. Corpus Development Activities at the Center for Spoken Language Understanding Ron Cole Mike Noel Daniel C Burnett Mark Fanty Terri Lander Beatrice Oshika Stephen Sutton Center for Spoken Language Understanding Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology Portland Oregon 97291 ABSTRACT This paper describes eight telephone speech corpora at vari ous stages of development at the Center for Spoken Language Understanding For each corpus we describe data collection procedures methods of soliciting callers protocol used to col lect the data transcriptions that accompany the speech data and the expected release date The corpora are available at no charge to academic institutions 1 INTRODUCTION The Center for Spoken Language Understanding CSLU collects and transcribes telephone speech data to enable re search activities at CSLU and elsewhere Corpus develop ment activities are performed by four full time staff aided by graduate students and part time employees In 1994 we an ticipate collecting and transcribing speech from 10 000 callers in twenty languages Corpus development activities are sup ported by industrial memberships and research grants Corpus development activities at CSLU include a collect ing telephone speech data in different languages b tran scribing speech at word and phonetic levels c developing and documenting transcription conventions for each level d measuring the level of a
5. a were digitized at 8000 samples per second with a 14 bit resolution All data are stored in the NIST wav file format some with MIT shortpack compression The remaining corpora are under development and estimated re lease dates are provided for each 2 1 Spelled and Spoken Names Corpus The Spelled and Spoken Names Corpus 3 contains utter ances from 3667 calls Callers were solicited through com puter newsgroups and a public relations campaign initiated by OGI The majority of callers were from the Pacific North west The proportion of male to female callers is 1 15 1 The goal was to collect samples of spoken English letters and spoken words to support a research project funded by U S WEST Callers received the following prompts e What city are you calling from e What is your last name e Please spell your last name e Please spell your last name with short pauses between letters Does your last name contain the letter A as in apple e What is your first name e Please spell your first name with short pauses between letters e What city and state did you grow up in e We will now ask you to say the alphabet We need you to pause briefly between letters like this A B C D E F G You may hang up when you are finished Please begin speaking now Would you like to receive more information about the results of this project If you would like more information about this project please leave your name and address a
6. cDonalds TCBY yo gurt B Dalton Books Blockbuster or Baskin Robbins please leave your name address and selection You may hang up when you are done Thank you The data collection is just beginning We expect this corpus will be available September 1994 2 8 OPERA Corpus CSLU is collaborating with the International Computer Sci ence Institute ICSI at Berkeley to develop speech corpora for Open Performance Evaluation of Recognition Algorithms OPERA These corpora will be distributed with designated training and test sets to all researchers who wish to compare recognition performance on a common task Performance evaluation and summary of results will also be provided The first OPERA corpus now under development consists of numbers taken from three of the corpora described earlier the Spelled and Spoken Words Corpus the Cellular Words Numbers and Alphabet Corpus and the English Census Cor pus We estimate the final corpus will consist of about 10 000 different numbers Thus far we have created numbers files from utterances in the Spelled and Spoken Names Corpus in which the caller provided their street address and zipcode Speech intervals containing numbers found in street addresses street names e g fifth and zip codes were located manually and new files were created containing just the numbers From approx imately 1300 different speakers 2167 files have been created Each file has been transcribed at the
7. calls have been transcribed at the non time aligned word level 300 at the time aligned word level and 200 at the time aligned phonetic level 2 4 Twenty one Language Corpus CSLU plans to collect and verify calls from at least 200 fluent native speakers in 21 languages Eastern Arabic Cantonese Czech Farsi French German Hindi Hungarian Japanese Korean Malay Mandarin Italian Polish Portuguese Rus sian Spanish Swedish Swahili Tamil and Vietnamese Ver ification and global judgments will be performed by native speakers The following is the English version of the protocol for the twenty one language corpus The protocol will be presented to the caller in their language e Thank you for calling the Oregon Graduate In stitute language database We are currently recording speech in language We are studying the different languages of the world To do this we need to record samples of speech from fluent speakers of language Please respond to the fol lowing questions and instructions in language only This will take about 7 minutes Please wait for the beep before speaking What is your native language What language do you speak most of the time What language do you speak at home What other languages do you speak and understand How old are you What is your date of birth Are you male or female How long have you been in the United States What city and state did you spend most of your child
8. coming calls were assigned to the eight conditions prompt X gender X source in rotation An interesting feature of the data collection was the use of automatic recognition to control the protocol Recognition of yes no other and American Indian was performed at certain decision points to determine subsequent prompts This is illustrated in the following protocol e Thank you for calling the OGI census project We appreciate your help The goal of this study is to determine the feasibility of using a comput erized questionnaire for the Year 2000 Census This research is sponsored by the United States Census Bureau The answers you give to the fol lowing questions will be kept confidential After wards we will ask you some questions to help us evaluate this questionnaire It will take approx imately four minutes to complete Please wait for the tone before answering each question e Please say your first name e Please spell your first name e Please say your last name e Please spell your last name e Please say your middle initial If you have no middle initial say none e What is your sex female or male We will now ask about your marital status Have you ever been married Please say yes or no o if yes then Which one of the following options best describes your current marital status now married wid owed divorced or separated We will now ask about your date of birth What mon
9. cribed We estimate that the corpus will be ready for distribution May 1994 2 7 Words Numbers and Phrases Corpus With support from Apple Computer CSLU is collecting both analog and digital speech data for utterances related to voice messaging and voice control of computer applica tions Callers are being provided both by Apple Computer and by CSLU through newspaper advertisements The protocol consists of two questions to help determine the caller s language background followed by instructions to re peat 35 words or phrases given in the prompt To increase 35 the usefulness of the corpus several sub vocabularies includ ing first names last names digits numbers and days of the week were inserted into the prompts For example the phrase phone first name is expanded to 50 different phrases using 50 common first names There are about 350 different phrases that will be recorded from different speakers The goal is to collect 1000 speakers using an Apple Macintosh Quadra A V and 2000 speakers on the digital T1 system using the LINKON setup The protocol is as follows Thank you for calling the Center for Spoken Language Understanding speech data base We appreciate your willingness to participate in our study This research is directly related to developing better human computer interaction through the use of voice control During this call we will be asking you to answer questions and repeat phrases After
10. essing Banff Alberta Canada October 1992 pp 891 893 Y K Muthusamy R A Cole and B T Oshika The OGI multi language telephone speech corpus Proceed ings of the International Conference on Spoken Lan guage Proceedings Banff Alberta Canada October 1992 pp 895 898 James L Hieronymus Ascii phonetic symbols for the world s languages Worldbet Journal of the Interna tional Phonetic Association 1993
11. estion Not used for respondent asking for a repeat due to back ground noise etc Respondent interrupts the speaking of the question This code implies a second code to account for the con tent of the interrup tion I don t know or any other equivalent for IA Request for Clarifica tion i Interruption eer 24 mulation Refusal Respondent refuses to answer Other respondent be havior Respondent behavior not captured in codes listed above Also in clude request for rep etition based on not hearing the question AA3 QA IA1 2 RC IN DK We are in the process of transcribing the calls that have been collected We expect that the transcriptions will be com pleted and the corpus ready for distribution by September lst 1994 2 6 Cellular Words Numbers and Alpha bet Corpus This corpus will consist of up to 600 calls made from cellular phones Each caller answers nine questions says words that might be used in voice messaging applications says a familiar phone number and recites the letters of the English alphabet Callers are being provided by a private company who helped fund the data collection The corpus is being collected using the Gradient Technology Desklab over an analog line Non time aligned word level transcriptions are being produced The protocol for the corpus is e Are you calling from a cellular phone If you hap
12. greement among transcribers e de veloping interactive speech tools for labeling f distributing the speech corpora to academic institutions free of charge and g placing speech tools and labeling conventions in the public domain for use by others In this section we present some general information about our corpus development activities In the following sections we will describe individual corpora Data Collection telephone speech data are collected over analog and digital telephone lines Prior to November 1993 speech data were collected over analog lines using several Gradient Technology Desklabs Since November 1993 the majority of our data has been collected using a 24 channel T1 line connected to three LINKON FC3000 Communica tion Boards We are also using an Apple GeoPort Telecom Adapter connected to a Macintosh Quadra A V to collect analog speech data for one of the corpora to be described Transcription Each call is processed by one or more listen ers Calls are verified to determine that the caller followed instructions and in some cases transcribed at some level Transcription of corpora occurs at three different levels non time aligned word level time aligned word level and time 31 aligned phonetic level Non time aligned word level tran scription involves producing an orthographic representation of the utterance including indications of extra speech events such as breathes or lip smacks without time
13. hood What is your zipcode What area code are you calling from What day is today What time is it Say a familiar telephone number How would you ask someone if they speak language Give us the greeting you usually use when answering the phone For each of the following descriptions we will record the first ten seconds of your answer Be gin speaking at the beep A second beep will indicate when we have finished recording your answer to each question Describe the route you take to work or to the store Tell us something that you like about your hometown Tell us about the climate in your hometown Describe the room you are calling from Describe your most recent meal We now want you to talk for a longer period of time We do not care what you say as long as you keep talking You can tell us anything about yourself your hobbies and interests the city that you live in and the sports that you like Or you can make up a story tell a fairy tale or recite a poem You will have 1 minute to speak We will now give you 10 seconds to think about what to say Please do not read anything we would prefer you make something up Please begin talking at the beep You will hear a second beep when you have 10 seconds left For the last question we would like you to tell us some thing about yourself in English If you do not speak English you may push any button on your phone or simply wait for 20 seconds At the beep plea
14. is type over the telephone In this questionnaire we asked about your name sex marital status date of birth origin race and telephone number Please tell us about any questions you found unclear or poorly worded What if anything did you like about this questionnaire What if anything do you suggest we do to improve this questionnaire We would like to hear any further comments you may have You may begin speaking at the tone When you re through if you would like a gift certificate to either Baskin Robbins TCBY Yogurt B Dalton Books Mc Donald s or Blockbuster Video please say which one and leave your mailing address Thank you for your help 34 Each call will be transcribed at the time aligned word level including indications of filled pauses and other non speech events Each utterance will also be assigned a behavior code which characterizes the usability of the response The behav ior codes are described in the following table AA1 Adequate Answer 1 Answer is concise and usable not concise Adequate Answer 3 i i S kaoni S An adequate answer in ial which respondent ex Answer is responsive but not usable Qualified Answer Gd presses uncertainty Inadequate Answer 1 Answer does not seem Inadequate Answer 2 Respondent says noth says nothing ing at all may have hung up or may be lurking A request for clarifica tion as to the meaning of a concept of survey qu
15. non time aligned word level and at the time aligned phonetic level 36 3 AVAILABILITY CSLU is dedicated to promoting progress in the field of com puter speech recognition To this end corpora are made available at no charge to academic institutions These data are available once they are completed Portions of the En hanced Multi Language Corpus have been placed in the pub lic domain For information on obtaining any of these corpora the con ventions document or the speech tools contact Mike Noel at noel cse ogi edu 4 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We are indebted to the organizations that helped fund the projects U S Bureau of the Census ONR NSF Linguistic Data Consortium U S West Digital Equipment Corporation LINKON Corporation and Apple Computer Much of the corpus development would have been impossible without the dedicated efforts of the labeling and transcribing staff Many thanks are due to Terri Durham Vince Weath erhill Amie Wilson Victoria Noel Alexandra Guerra Troy Bailey Johan Schalkwyk and many others References Terri Lander S T Metzler The CSLU Labeling Guide CSLU Oregon February 1994 CSLU OGI speech tools user s manual Technical re port Center for Spoken Language Understanding Ore gon Graduate Institute 1993 R A Cole K Roginski and M Fanty A Telephone Speech Database of Spelled and Spoken Names Pro ceedings of the International Conference on Spoken Language Proc
16. pen to know if you are calling from an analog or digital phone please say which one Are you using a speaker phone What is your native language Where were you born Where did you spend your childhood What is the month day and year of your birth Please say your name e o gt o gt o o Please say the name of the company or organization you are with We will now say a set of words and would like you to repeat each word after you hear it The words that you speak are intended to be com mands to a voice processing system When you say each command try to imagine that you are telling the system what to do The caller was prompted for the following words one at a time Each word was presented in the carrier phrase Say now Cancel Change Greeting Continue Copy Erase Help Listen No Operator Pause Replay Rerecord Reply Resume Review Save Send copy Yes Add Dial Call Edit Callback Change Delete Phonebook Beginning Choices End Directory assistance Customer support Next Repeat Replay message Return call Skip Tu torial Customer care Verify Scan Messages Message List Rewind Fax Voice Print Please say a familiar phone number one digit at a time We would now like you to recite the English alphabet with a brief pause between letters like this A B C D E Please hang up when you are finished Thanks again Currently approximately 300 calls have been collected and trans
17. se tell us something about yourself in English If you are calling from a touch tone phone please push the number 2 button Would you like to receive a gift certificate for McDonalds or for TCBY frozen yogurt 33 Thank you for your participation If you would like a gift certificate please leave your name address and gift certificate selection Your name and address will be kept confidential To date the prompts for several of the languages have been recorded by native speakers We expect to begin collection for five languages in March 1994 and then will add five more languages every two weeks until the collection is finished The expected completion data is yet to be determined 2 5 English Census Corpus In conjunction with the U S Bureau of the Census CSLU is collecting data to develop a prototype automated census system Callers were solicited by the Census Bureau a mem orandum was sent to regional offices asking Census Bureau employees their family members and family friends to call an 800 number on a voluntary basis to provide speech data for the study A different 800 number was provided for each city The cities are Dallas Chicago Boston Charlotte Atlanta Philadelphia Denver Kansas City Detroit and Seattle Two protocols were used that differed in the wording of some of the prompts Each protocol was recorded by both male and female speakers In addition male and female synthesized voices were used In
18. t the tone Documentation of the Spelled and Spoken Name Corpus in cludes a speaker by speaker log file containing orthographic transcriptions of each utterance Each utterance was tran scribed by two separate listeners The log also contains the global judgments of gender age connection quality accent and intelligibility In addition occurrences of extraneous speech environmental noise excessive breath or line noise are indicated in the log file for each utterance A subset of the data was transcribed at the time aligned pho netic level The utterances were labeled by hand then labels and time alignments with the speech spectrogram were ver ified by an expert spectrogram reader The subsets of pho netically labeled utterances available to date are as follows alphabet hometown callfrom say first name say last name spell last name with pause 2 2 Enhanced OGI Multi Language Cor pus The OGI Multi Language Telephone Speech Corpus 4 con sists of telephone speech from 10 languages English Farsi French German Japanese Korean Mandarin Spanish Tamil and Vietnamese The initial corpus included 900 calls 90 calls for each language Callers were solicited through computer newsgroups Each caller was asked to respond to the following prompts 32 What is your native language What language do you speak most of the time Please recite the seven days of the week Please say the numbers zero through ten
19. th were you born What day of the month What year We will now ask about your origin Are you of Spanish or Hispanic origin Please say yes or no if yes then Are you of Mexican Mexican American or Chicano origin Please say yes or no if no then Are you of Puerto Rican origin if no then Are you of Cuban origin if no then Please say what other Spanish or Hispanic group is your origin Please spell that We will now ask about your race Are you White Black or Negro American Indian Eskimo Aleut or other if American Indian then What is the name of your tribe Please spell that if other then Okay Are you Chinese Japanese Asian Indian Korean Vietnamese or other if other then Okay Are you Filipino Hawaiian Samoan Guamanian or other if other then Please say the name of your race Please spell that Is that the name of an Asian or Pacific Islander race Do you have a telephone at home Please say yes or no if yes then Please say your home telephone number area code first Finally we d like some additional information to help us with our study What is your native language In what city and state did you spend most of your child hood Are you a Census Bureau employee This concludes the questionnaire portion We will now ask you some questions to help us eval uate this questionnaire Would you be willing to provide census information us ing a questionnaire of th
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