SmartWeb UMTS Speech Data Collection: The SmartWeb Handheld Corpus

Abstract

In this paper we outline the German speech data collection for the SmartWeb project, which is funded by the German Ministry of Science and Education. We focus on the SmartWeb Handheld Corpus (SHC), which has been collected by the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals (BAS) at the Phonetic Institute (IPSK) of Munich University. Signals of SHC are being recorded in real-life environments (indoor and outdoor) with real background noise as well as real transmission line errors. We developed a new elicitation method and recording technique, called situational prompting, which facilitates collecting realistic dialogue speech data in a cost efficient way. We can show that almost realistic speech queries to a dialogue system issued over a mobile PDA or smart phone can be collected very efficiently using an automatic speech server. We describe the technical and linguistic features of the resulting speech corpus, which will be publicly available at BAS or ELDA.