Speech corpus

A speech corpus (or spoken corpus) is a database of speech audio files and text transcriptions. In Speech technology, speech corpora are used, among other things, to create acoustic models (which can then be used with a speech recognition engine). In Linguistics, spoken corpora are used to do research into phonetic, conversation analysis, dialectology and other fields.

A corpus is one such database. Corpora is the plural of corpus (i.e. it is many such databases).

There are two types of Speech Corpora:

1. Read Speech - which includes:
2. Book excerpts
3. Broadcast news
4. Lists of words
5. Sequences of numbers
6. Spontaneous Speech - which includes:
7. Dialogs - between two or more people (includes meetings);
8. Narratives - a person telling a story (one such corpus is the Buckeye Corpus);
9. Map-tasks - one person explains a route on a map to another;
10. Appointment-tasks - two people try to find a common meeting time based on individual schedules.

A special kind of speech corpora are non-native speech databases that contain speech with foreign accent.