A Review on Speech Corpus Development for Automatic Speech Recognition in Indian Languages

Int. J. Advanced Networking and Applications
Volume: 06 Issue: 06 Pages: 2556-2558 (2015) ISSN: 0975-0290
2556
A Review on Speech Corpus Development for
Automatic Speech Recognition in Indian
Languages
Cini kurian
Department of computer Science, Al-Ameen college, Edathala,Aluva, Kerala
cinikurian@gmail.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------ABSTRACT---------------------------------------------------------
Corpus development gained much attention due to recent statistics based natural language processing. It has new
applications in Language Technology, linguistic research, language education and information exchange. Corpus
based Language research has an innovative outlook which will discard the aged linguistic theories. Speech corpus
is the essential resources for building a speech recognizer. One of the main challenges faced by speech scientist is
the unavailability of these resources. Very fewer efforts have been made in Indian languages to make these
resources available to public compared to English. In this paper we review the efforts made in Indian languages
for developing speech corpus for automatic speech recognition.
Keywords - Speech corpus, Indian languages
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Date of Submission: August 28, 2014 Date of Acceptance: December 29, 2014
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I. INTRODUCTION
In modern linguistic, Corpus is the machine readable
form of the large collection of structured text in written or
spoken form[1]. If corpora can give some linguistic
information it is called annotated Corpora. In English and
in other languages many path breaking researches have
been done and many pioneering computer based systems
have been developed using language corpora. Importance
of language corpora is recognized in many countries.
However, as far as India is concerned, using corpora in
language and NLP research is a time taking process as it
is difficult to capture fancy of Indian linguistics because of
its diversity. Importance of language corpora is recognized
in many countries. However, there is lot of scope to
develop language technology systems using Indian
languages which are of different variations. To achieve
such ambitious goals, the collection of standard speech
databases is a prerequisite. This paper review the
development of speech corpus in Indian languages
II.SURVEY ON SPEECH CORPUS OF
INDIAN LANGUAGES
Speech corpus has been collected in Marathi language
at TIFR (Mumbai) and IIT Bombay jointly as a part of a
project sanctioned by the Technology Development for
Indian Languages (TDIL) for the development of speech
recognition system for agriculture purpose. The speech
data for the project was collected from the speaker at TIFR
Mumbai and IIT Bombay using two dedicated phone line.
For the development of database two volunteers were
appointed by the TIFR and IIT Bombay. They visited the
various districts of Maharashtra and Collect the speech
sample by calling the dedicated phone line at TIFR and
IIT Bombay. The speech database consists of data
recorded from approximately 1500 speakers. As the data
was recorded using phone lines it is narrow band speech
along with background noise so the volunteers also have
digital voice recorders to collect the wide band speech
simultaneously when the speaker speaks on the phone line
[2].
A Speech Database of Hindi language for automatic
speech recognition system for travel domain has been
developed at C-DAC Noida. The database consists of
training data collected from 30 female speakers in a noise
free environment consisting of approximately 26 hours of
speech recordings. Total 8,567 sentences consisting
74,807 words were recorded by the speakers uniformly
distributed over all age group from 17 to 60 years. The
recognition system was developed for the same recorded
data and the recognition rate achieved for training data
was 70.73% and that for the test data was 60.66% [3].
A MIS (i.e. Mandi Information System) for retrieval of
commodity price of market using mobile/telephone system
has been developed at IIIT Hyderabad. The proposed MIS
was in Telugu language. Speech corpus consisting of 17
hours of speech data recorded from 96 speakers in noisy
environment using mobile phones. A total of 500 words
were recorded from each speaker. Approximately 15 hours
of recorded speech data has collected to build the acoustic
model of ASR [4].
A speech to speech synthesis system for travel and
emergency services in Indian languages is developed at
IIIT Hyderabad. The speech databases developed include
English, Telugu and Hindi speech corpus from 15 different
speakers. All the recordings were done using a laptop and
a standard microphone in a room in noise free
environment [5].
A Garhwali speech database is developed for
development of automatic speech recognition system for
Garhwali language at Government P.G. College,
Rishikesh. Total number of 100 speakers consisting of 50
male and 50 female have been selected to speak the
selected words or sentences. All speakers were from

2557
different district of Uttarakhand. The speech recording
was done in the lab in noisy environment which would be
helpful for the development of the robust speech
recognition system [6].
A large vocabulary continuous speech database is
developed at IIIT Hyderabad with coordination of HP
Labs Bangalore. The developed database was in three
different languages i.e. Marathi, Tamil and Telugu. The
speech data was recorded using mobile and landline. A
total of 559 speakers participated for recording speech in
all three different languages. The speakers who
participated in recording procedure were from different
age groups. The Speech data was collected from the native
speakers of the language. Mobile phones and landlines
were used to record the speech data from the speakers. The
recorded speech consists of background noise and
disturbance is caused due to use of phone line [7].
A Punjabi language speech database has been developed
for text to speech synthesis system at department of
computer science, Punjabi University, Patiala. The
syllables were considered for developing the said speech
database for text to speech Synthesis system because the
researchers have selected syllables as the basic unit of
concatenation. This Punjabi language speech database
consists of 3,312 syllables which account for more than
99% of commutative percentage frequency in the selected
corpus. These syllables were selected after analyzing total
possible syllables of Punjabi corpus which was having
nearly 2, 33,009 unique and more than four million words;
out of which 9,317 were valid syllables from which 3312
syllables were selected. The selected syllables were
recorded from a speaker using standard microphone in the
studio environment [8].
A general purpose, multi speaker, Continuous Speech
Database has been developed for Hindi language by the
researchers of TIFR Mumbai and CDAC Noida. The Hindi
Speech database is comprehensive enough to capture
phonetic, acoustic, intra-speaker and inter speaker
variabilities in Hindi Speech. This database consists of sets
of 10 phonetically rich Hindi sentences spoken by 100
native speakers of Hindi language. The speech data was
digitally recorded using two microphones in a noise free
environment. Each speaker was asked to read the 10
sentences consisting 2 parts. The first part consists of two
sentences which preferably covers the maximum
phonemes of Hindi language. Every speaker was asked to
speak these two sentences. The second part consisted of 8
sentences which covered maximum possible phonetic
context. Though this continuous speech database was
developed for training speech recognition system for
Hindi language, it has been designed and developed in
such a manner that is can also be used in tasks such as
speaker recognition, study of acoustic-phonetic
correlation of the language [9].
Another general purpose speech database has been
developed in Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, and Kannada from
broadcasted news bulletin at IIT Kharagpur. This database
was used for developing the prosody models for Speech
recognition, Speech Synthesis, Speaker Recognition and
language identification application. The total database for
the four languages is of 17.5 hours. Total durations of
speech in Hindi, Telugu, Tamil and Kannada are 3.5 h, 4.5
h, 5 h and 4.5 h respectively. For Hindi Language data was
recorded from 19 speakers (6 Male, 13 Females), for
Telugu 20 Speakers (11 Male, 9 Females), for Tamil 33
Speakers (10 Male, 23 Females) and for Kannada 20
Speakers (12 Male, 8 Females). In each language these
news bulletins were read by male and female speakers. As
the speech database developed is of broadcast news the
recording is done in the studio in a noise free environment
[10].
At KIIT, Bhubaneswar a project for Mobile Text and
Speech database collection in Hindi and Indian Spoken
English has been completed. The Project was sponsored
by Nokia Research Centre, China. The speech data was
collected using 13 prompt sheets containing 630
phonetically rich sentences in each language prepared after
collecting text messages in Hindi and Indian Spoken
English. The collected text corpus for Hindi and English
consists of 42,801 and 33,963 of unique words
respectively. The speech data was recorded from 100
speakers for both the languages. The speech data was
recorded using 3 channels (i.e. mobile phone, Omi
directional microphone and cardioids microphone)
simultaneously at a sampling frequency of 16,000 Hz. The
developed speech database consists 60% female voice
recording and 40% male voice recording [11].
A Text to speech synthesis for Konkani language has
been developed at Rajarambapu Institute of Technology
Sakharale, Islampur, Maharashtra. For the development of
Text to Speech Synthesis, a limited vocabulary speech
database has been developed. The said database contains
speech data recorded for more than thousand Konkani
commonly used words. Students were asked to take part as
speaker for recording the speech data in their voice using
standard microphone and a computer in the laboratory.
The developed speech database consists of around 3,000
wave files consisting of Vowels, characters and half
Characters [12].
A Speech database has been developed for developing a
Text to Speech Synthesis system in Kannada language at
Mysore. The basic entity selected for the speech synthesis
in this project was phonemes. This speech database
consists of total 1,605 phonemes. The phonemes were
recorded using the utility tool PRAAT on Windows
Operating System platform. The sampling frequency used
for recording the speech was 16,000 Hz. The recording
was done using the standard microphone in lab. The
recorded phonemes include vowels, semi vowels, stops,
fricatives, nasals etc [13].
III. COLLECTIVE EFFORTS
India, as a multilingual country realized its prospects
and DOE ( Department of Electronics, Govt. of India)
under the TDIL (Technology Development for Indian
Languages)program has initiated some work on corpora
development of all major Indian languages. Under this
program, in association with CIIL( Central Institute of
Indian Languages) , machine readable corpora for major

2558
languages has been developed . While comparing with
British National Corpus (BNC) which contains data
obtained from people on all walks of life, we are in the
infancy stage. About 50 hours of annotated speech corpora
for Hindi, Marati, Punjabi, Bengali, Assamese, and
Manipuri languages have been developed by C-DAC
(Centre for Development of Advanced Computing) Noida
and C-DAC Calcutta. Corpus generation in India is facing
several problems due to lack of a centralized authority (a
consortium). Many organizations and institutes have
collected corpus for their own research activities.
However, these resources are not available to all groups of
people working for corpus generation. TDIL and CIIL
have taken some initiatives and put the data on the web
and their contributions have been appreciated. But there
should be national archive for Indian language corpora, so
that all corpora will be systematically preserved,
documented, distributed, accessed by the users.
The Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), European
Language Resources Association (ELRA), and The
International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval
English (ICAME) are the good models for this.The
Linguistic Data Consortium for Indian Languages (LDC-
IL) is the Consortium established after a long persuasion
for developing a similar activity like Linguistic Data
Consortium (LDC) at the University of Pennsylvania. The
services of LDC-IL have been hosted and managed by
CIIL Mysore. It is also supported by the Central
Government of India. The LDC-IL is responsible to create
the database and to provide forum for the researchers all
over the world to develop speech application using the
collected data in various domains. The LDC-IL has
collected Speech databases in various Indian Languages
[168].
IV.CONCLUSION
Speech corpus applications have tremendous prospects
in India since it is an essential component of speech
recognition research. An attempt has been made through
this paper to give a comprehensive survey on the
development of corpus for automatic speech recognition in
Indian languages.
REFERENCES
[1] Dash, N S and B B Chaudhuri. “Why do we need
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Speech Data Acquisition for voice based
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[3] Sunita Arora, Babita Saxena, Karunesh Arora, S S
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