The Norwegian Parliamentary Speech Corpus

Per Erik Solberg, Pablo Ortiz


Abstract
The Norwegian Parliamentary Speech Corpus (NPSC) is a speech dataset with recordings of meetings from Stortinget, the Norwegian parliament. It is the first, publicly available dataset containing unscripted, Norwegian speech designed for training of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. The recordings are manually transcribed and annotated with language codes and speakers, and there are detailed metadata about the speakers. The transcriptions exist in both normalized and non-normalized form, and non-standardized words are explicitly marked and annotated with standardized equivalents. To test the usefulness of this dataset, we have compared an ASR system trained on the NPSC with a baseline system trained on only manuscript-read speech. These systems were tested on an independent dataset containing spontaneous, dialectal speech. The NPSC-trained system performed significantly better, with a 22.9% relative improvement in word error rate (WER). Moreover, training on the NPSC is shown to have a “democratizing” effects in terms of dialects, as improvements are generally larger for dialects with higher WER from the baseline system.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.106
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
1003–1008
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.106
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Per Erik Solberg and Pablo Ortiz. 2022. The Norwegian Parliamentary Speech Corpus. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 1003–1008, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
The Norwegian Parliamentary Speech Corpus (Solberg & Ortiz, LREC 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.106.pdf
Data
NPSC