15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15) Barcelona, Spain August 3-9, 2003

Designing a Finnish Multimodal Speech Database System

Toomas Altosaar (1), Mietta Lennes (2), Manne Miettinen (3), Mickel Gronroos (3), Matti Karjalainen (1)

(1) Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
(2) University of Helsinki, Finland
(3) CSC - Scientific Computing Ltd., Finland

Many different research groups in Finland use Finnish speech material as a basis for their studies. Since a general speech database is not available and there exist no common guidelines for collecting and annotating speech material, speech corpora end up being compiled in a variety of ways - often for just a single research purpose. This is both inefficient and inhibitory to interdisciplinary cooperation. To improve the situation, a project named "Integrated Resources for Speech Technology and Spoken Language Research in Finland" as initiated. The goal of the project is to design several exemplar and prototypical multimodal speech database systems that can serve as examples for these research groups, build a conforming but extendable infrastructure by selecting, building and refining necessary applications for speech annotation and database access, and to compile guidelines for annotation so that in the future, speech corpora can be shared readily.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Altosaar, Toomas / Lennes, Mietta / Miettinen, Manne / Gronroos, Mickel / Karjalainen, Matti (2003): "Designing a Finnish multimodal speech database system", In ICPhS-15, 1369-1372.