Chelzy Belitz


2022

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Fearless Steps APOLLO: Advanced Naturalistic Corpora Development
John H.L. Hansen | Aditya Joglekar | Szu-Jui Chen | Meena Chandra Shekar | Chelzy Belitz
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Novel Incentives in Data Collection from People: models, implementations, challenges and results within LREC 2022

In this study, we present the Fearless Steps APOLLO Community Resource, a collection of audio and corresponding meta-data diarized from the NASA Apollo Missions. Massive naturalistic speech data which is time-synchronized, without any human subject privacy constraints is very rare and difficult to organize, collect, and deploy. The Apollo Missions Audio is the largest collection of multi-speaker multi-channel data, where over 600 personnel are communicating over multiple missions to achieve strategic space exploration goals. A total of 12 manned missions over a six-year period produced extensive 30-track 1-inch analog tapes containing over 150,000 hours of audio. This presents the wider research community a unique opportunity to extract multi-modal knowledge in speech science, team cohesion and group dynamics, and historical archive preservation. We aim to make this entire resource and supporting speech technology meta-data creation publicly available as a Community Resource for the development of speech and behavioral science. Here we present the development of this community resource, our outreach efforts, and technological developments resulting from this data. We finally discuss the planned future directions for this community resource.