Corpora of disordered speech (CDS) are costly to collect and difficult to share due to personal data protection and intellectual property (IP) issues. In this contribution we discuss the legal grounds for processing CDS in the light of the GDPR, and illustrate these with two use cases from the DELAD context. One use case deals with clinical datasets and another with legacy data from Polish hearing-impaired children. For both cases, processing based on consent and on public interest are taken into consideration.

This paper reports on a new database ― Polish rhythmic database and tools developed with the aim of investigating timing phenomena and rhythmic structure in Polish including topics such as, inter alia, the effect of speaking style and tempo on timing patterns, phonotactic and phrasal properties of speech rhythm and stability of rhythm metrics. So far, 19 native and 12 non-native speakers with different first languages have been recorded. The collected speech data (5 h 14 min.) represents five different speaking styles and five different tempi. For the needs of speech corpus management, annotation and analysis, a database was developed and integrated with Annotation Pro (Klessa et al., 2013, Klessa, 2016). Currently, the database is the only resource for Polish which allows for a systematic study of a broad range of phenomena related to speech timing and rhythm. The paper also introduces new tools and methods developed to facilitate the database annotation and analysis with respect to various timing and rhythm measures. In the end, the results of an ongoing research and first experimental results using the new resources are reported and future work is sketched.

The present paper describes the development of the languagesindanger.eu interactive website as an example of including multimedia language resources to disseminate knowledge and create educational material on less-resourced languages. The website is a product of INNET (Innovative networking in infrastructure for endangered languages), European FP7 project. Its main functions can be summarized as related to the three following areas: (1) raising students’ awareness of language endangerment and arouse their interest in linguistic diversity, language maintenance and language documentation; (2) informing both students and teachers about these topics and show ways how they can enlarge their knowledge further with a special emphasis on information about language archives; (3) helping teachers include these topics into their classes. The website has been localized into five language versions with the intention to be accessible to both scientific and non-scientific communities such as (primarily) secondary school teachers and students, beginning university students of linguistics, journalists, the interested public, and also members of speech communities who speak minority languages.

This paper reports on two tools for the automatic statistical analysis of selected properties of speech timing on the basis of speech annotation files. The tools, one online (TGA, Time Group Analyser) and one offline (Annotation Pro+TGA), are intended to support the rapid analysis of speech timing data without the need to create specific scripts or spreadsheet functions for this purpose. The software calculates, inter alia, mean, median, rPVI, nPVI, slope and intercept functions within interpausal groups, provides visualisations of timing patterns, as well as correlations between these, and parses interpausal groups into hierarchies based on duration relations. Although many studies, especially in speech technology, use computational means, enquiries have shown that a large number of phoneticians and phonetics students do not have script creation skills and therefore use traditional copy+spreadsheet techniques, which are slow, preclude the analysis of large data sets, and are prone to inconsistencies. The present tools have been tested in a number of studies on English, Mandarin and Polish, and are introduced here with reference to results from these studies.

The paper provides an overview of the Polish Speech Database for taking dictation of legal texts, created for the purpose of LVCSR system for Polish. It presents background information about the design of the database and the requirements coming from its future uses. The applied method of the text corpora construction is presented as well as the database structure and recording scenarios. The most important details on the recording conditions and equipment are specified, followed by the description of the assessment methodology of recording quality, and the annotation specification and evaluation. Additionally, the paper contains current statistics from the database and the information about both the ongoing and planned stages of the database development process.