Globalphone: a multilingual speech and text database developed at karlsruhe university

Abstract

This paper describes the design, collection, and current status of the multilingual database GlobalPhone, an ongoing project since 1995 at Karlsruhe University. GlobalPhone is a highquality read speech and text database in a large variety of languages which is suitable for the development of large vocabulary speech recognition systems in many languages. It has already been successfully applied to language independent and language adaptive speech recognition. GlobalPhone currently covers 15 languages Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin and Shanghai), Croatian, Czech, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, and Turkish. The corpus contains more than 300 hours of transcribed speech spoken by more than 1500 native, adult speakers and will soon be available from ELRA.