This study examined differences in linguistic features produced by autistic and neurotypical (NT) children during brief picture descriptions, and assessed feature stability over time. Weekly speech samples from well-characterized participants were collected using a telephony system designed to improve access for geographically isolated and historically marginalized communities. Results showed stable group differences in certain acoustic features, some of which may potentially serve as key outcome measures in future treatment studies. These results highlight the importance of eliciting semi-structured speech samples in a variety of contexts over time, and adds to a growing body of research showing that fine-grained naturalistic communication features hold promise for intervention research.

The WeCanTalk (WCT) Corpus is a new multi-language, multi-modal resource for speaker recognition. The corpus contains Cantonese, Mandarin and English telephony and video speech data from over 200 multilingual speakers located in Hong Kong. Each speaker contributed at least 10 telephone conversations of 8-10 minutes’ duration collected via a custom telephone platform based in Hong Kong. Speakers also uploaded at least 3 videos in which they were both speaking and visible, along with one selfie image. At least half of the calls and videos for each speaker were in Cantonese, while their remaining recordings featured one or more different languages. Both calls and videos were made in a variety of noise conditions. All speech and video recordings were audited by experienced multilingual annotators for quality including presence of the expected language and for speaker identity. The WeCanTalk Corpus has been used to support the NIST 2021 Speaker Recognition Evaluation and will be published in the LDC catalog.

We introduce a new resource, the SAFE-T (Speech Analysis for Emergency Response Technology) Corpus, designed to simulate first-responder communications by inducing high vocal effort and urgent speech with situational background noise in a game-based collection protocol. Linguistic Data Consortium developed the SAFE-T Corpus to support the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) OpenSAT (Speech Analytic Technologies) evaluation series, whose goal is to advance speech analytic technologies including automatic speech recognition, speech activity detection and keyword search in multiple domains including simulated public safety communications data. The corpus comprises over 300 hours of audio from 115 unique speakers engaged in a collaborative problem-solving activity representative of public safety communications in terms of speech content, noise types and noise levels. Portions of the corpus have been used in the OpenSAT 2019 evaluation and the full corpus will be published in the LDC catalog. We describe the design and implementation of the SAFE-T Corpus collection, discuss the approach of capturing spontaneous speech from study participants through game-based speech collection, and report on the collection results including several challenges associated with the collection.

We introduce the Call My Net 2 (CMN2) Corpus, a new resource for speaker recognition featuring Tunisian Arabic conversations between friends and family, incorporating both traditional telephony and VoIP data. The corpus contains data from over 400 Tunisian Arabic speakers collected via a custom-built platform deployed in Tunis, with each speaker making 10 or more calls each lasting up to 10 minutes. Calls include speech in various realistic and natural acoustic settings, both noisy and non-noisy. Speakers used a variety of handsets, including landline and mobile devices, and made VoIP calls from tablets or computers. All calls were subject to a series of manual and automatic quality checks, including speech duration, audio quality, language identity and speaker identity. The CMN2 corpus has been used in two NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluations (SRE18 and SRE19), and the SRE test sets as well as the full CMN2 corpus will be published in the Linguistic Data Consortium Catalog. We describe CMN2 corpus requirements, the telephone collection platform, and procedures for call collection. We review properties of the CMN2 dataset and discuss features of the corpus that distinguish it from prior SRE collection efforts, including some of the technical challenges encountered with collecting VoIP data.

The Multi-language Speech (MLS) Corpus supports NIST’s Language Recognition Evaluation series by providing new conversational telephone speech and broadcast narrowband data in 20 languages/dialects. The corpus was built with the intention of testing system performance in the matter of distinguishing closely related or confusable linguistic varieties, and careful manual auditing of collected data was an important aspect of this work. This paper lists the specific data requirements for the collection and provides both a commentary on the rationale for those requirements as well as an outline of the various steps taken to ensure all goals were met as specified. LDC conducted a large-scale recruitment effort involving the implementation of candidate assessment and interview techniques suitable for hiring a large contingent of telecommuting workers, and this recruitment effort is discussed in detail. We also describe the telephone and broadcast collection infrastructure and protocols, and provide details of the steps taken to pre-process collected data prior to auditing. Finally, annotation training, procedures and outcomes are presented in detail.

The DARPA BOLT Program develops systems capable of allowing English speakers to retrieve and understand information from informal foreign language genres. Phase 2 of the program required large volumes of naturally occurring informal text (SMS) and chat messages from individual users in multiple languages to support evaluation of machine translation systems. We describe the design and implementation of a robust collection system capable of capturing both live and archived SMS and chat conversations from willing participants. We also discuss the challenges recruitment at a time when potential participants have acute and growing concerns about their personal privacy in the realm of digital communication, and we outline the techniques adopted to confront those challenges. Finally, we review the properties of the resulting BOLT Phase 2 Corpus, which comprises over 6.5 million words of naturally-occurring chat and SMS in English, Chinese and Egyptian Arabic.

The DARPA RATS program was established to foster development of language technology systems that can perform well on speaker-to-speaker communications over radio channels that evince a wide range in the type and extent of signal variability and acoustic degradation. Creating suitable corpora to address this need poses an equally wide range of challenges for the collection, annotation and quality assessment of relevant data. This paper describes the LDC’s multi-year effort to build the RATS data collection, summarizes the content and properties of the resulting corpora, and discusses the novel problems and approaches involved in ensuring that the data would satisfy its intended use, to provide speech recordings and annotations for training and evaluating HLT systems that perform 4 specific tasks on difficult radio channels: Speech Activity Detection (SAD), Language Identification (LID), Speaker Identification (SID) and Keyword Spotting (KWS).

The development of technologies to address machine translation and distillation of multilingual broadcast data depends heavily on the collection of large volumes of material from modern data providers. To address the needs of GALE researchers, the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) developed a system for collecting broadcast news and conversation from a variety of Arabic, Chinese and English broadcasters. The system is highly automated, easily extensible and robust and is capable of collecting, processing and evaluating hundreds of hours of content from several dozen sources per day. In addition to this extensive system, LDC manages three remote collection sites to maximize the variety of available broadcast data and has designed a portable broadcast collection platform to facilitate remote collection. This paper will present a detailed a description of the design and implementation of LDC’s collection system, the technical challenges and solutions to large scale broadcast data collection efforts and an overview of the system’s operation. This paper will also discuss the challenges of managing remote collections, in particular, the strategies used to normalize data formats, naming conventions and delivery methods to achieve optimal integration of remotely-collected data into LDC’s collection database and downstream tasking workflow.

The Greybeard Project was designed so as to enable research in speaker recognition using data that have been collected over a long period of time. Since 1994, LDC has been collecting speech samples for use in research and evaluations. By mining our earlier collections we assembled a list of subjects who had participated in multiple studies. These participants were then contacted and asked to take part in the Greybeard Project. The only constraint was that the participants must have made numerous calls in prior studies and the calls had to be a minimum of two years old. The archived data was sorted by participant and subsequent calls were added to their files. This is the first longitudinal study of its kind. The resulting corpus contains multiple calls for each participant that span anywhere from two to 12 years in time. It is our hope that these data will enable speaker recognition researchers to explore the effects of aging on voice.

Linguistic Data Consortium’s Human Subjects Data Collection lab conducts multi-modal speech collections to develop corpora for use in speech, speaker and language research and evaluations. The Mixer collections have evolved over the years to best accommodate the ever changing needs of the research community and to hopefully keep one step ahead by providing increasingly challenging data. Over the years Mixer collections have grown to include socio-linguistic interviews, a wide variety of telephone conditions and multiple languages, recording conditions, channels and speech acts.. Mixer 6 was the most recent collection. This paper describes the Mixer 6 Phase 1 project. Mixer 6 Phase 1 was a study supporting linguistic research, technology development and education. The object of this study was to record speech in a variety of situations that vary formality and model multiple naturally occurring interactions as well as a variety of channel conditions

The original Mixer corpus was designed to satisfy developing commercial and forensic needs. The resulting Mixer corpora, Phases 1 through 5, have evolved to support and increasing variety of research tasks, including multilingual and cross-channel recognition. The Mixer Phases 4 and 5 corpora feature a wider variety of channels and greater variation in the situations under which the speech is recorded. This paper focuses on the plans, progress and results of Mixer 4 and 5.

This paper describes the planning and creation of the Mixer and Transcript Reading corpora, their properties and yields, and reports on the lessons learned during their development.

Speech technology applications, such as speech recognition, speech synthesis, and speech dialog systems, often require corpora based on highly customized specifications. Existing corpora available to the community, such as TIMIT and other corpora distributed by LDC and ELDA, do not always meet the requirements of such applications. In such cases, the developers need to create their own corpora. The creation of a highly customized speech corpus, however, could be a very expensive and time-consuming task, especially for small organizations. It requires multidisciplinary expertise in linguistics, management and engineering as it involves subtasks such as the corpus design, human subject recruitment, recording, quality assurance, and in some cases, segmentation, transcription and annotation. This paper describes LDC's recent involvement in the creation of a low-cost yet highly-customized speech corpus for a commercial organization under a novel data creation and licensing model, which benefits both the particular data requester and the general linguistic data user community.