The development of language technologies (LTs) such as machine translation, text analytics, and dialogue systems is essential in the current digital society, culture and economy. These LTs, widely supported in languages in high demand worldwide, such as English, are also necessary for smaller and less economically powerful languages, as they are a driving force in the democratization of the communities that use them due to their great social and cultural impact. As an example, dialogue systems allow us to communicate with machines in our own language; machine translation increases access to contents in different languages, thus facilitating intercultural relations; and text-to-speech and speech-to-text systems broaden different categories of users’ access to technology. In the case of Galician (co-official language, together with Spanish, in the autonomous region of Galicia, located in northwestern Spain), incorporating the language into state-of-the-art AI applications can not only significantly favor its prestige (a decisive factor in language normalization), but also guarantee citizens’ language rights, reduce social inequality, and narrow the digital divide. This is the main motivation behind the Nós Project (Proxecto Nós), which aims to have a significant contribution to the development of LTs in Galician (currently considered a low-resource language) by providing openly licensed resources, tools, and demonstrators in the area of intelligent technologies.

The “Corpus Oral Informatizado da Lingua Galega (CORILGA)” project aims at building a corpus of oral language for Galician, primarily designed to study the linguistic variation and change. This project is currently under development and it is periodically enriched with new contributions. The long-term goal is that all the speech recordings will be enriched with phonetic, syllabic, morphosyntactic, lexical and sentence ELAN-complaint annotations. A way to speed up the process of annotation is to use automatic speech-recognition-based tools tailored to the application. Therefore, CORILGA repository has been enhanced with an automatic alignment tool, available to the administrator of the repository, that aligns speech with an orthographic transcription. In the event that no transcription, or just a partial one, were available, a speech recognizer for Galician is used to generate word and phonetic segmentations. These recognized outputs may contain errors that will have to be manually corrected by the administrator. For assisting this task, the tool also provides an ELAN tier with the confidence measure of each recognized word. In this paper, after the description of the main facts of the CORILGA corpus, the speech alignment and recognition tools are described. Both have been developed using the Kaldi toolkit.

This paper describes the CORILGA (“Corpus Oral Informatizado da Lingua Galega”). CORILGA is a large high-quality corpus of spoken Galician from the 1960s up to present-day, including both formal and informal spoken language from both standard and non-standard varieties, and across different generations and social levels. The corpus will be available to the research community upon completion. Galician is one of the EU languages that needs further research before highly effective language technology solutions can be implemented. A software repository for speech resources in Galician is also described. The repository includes a structured database, a graphical interface and processing tools. The use of a database enables to perform search in a simple and fast way based in a number of different criteria. The web-based user interface facilitates users the access to the different materials. Last but not least a set of transcription-based modules for automatic speech recognition has been developed, thus facilitating the orthographic labelling of the recordings.