The czech broadcast conversation corpus

This paper presents the final version of the Czech Broadcast Conversation Corpus that will shortly be released at the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC). The corpus contains 72 recordings of a radio discussion program, which yields about 33 hours of transcribed conversational speech from 128 speakers. The release does not only include verbatim transcripts and speaker information, but also structural metadata (MDE) annotation that involves labeling of sentence-like unit boundaries, marking of non-content words like filled pauses and discourse markers, and annotation of speech disfluencies. The MDE annotation is based on the LDC's annotation standard for English, with changes applied to accommodate phenomena that are specific for Czech. In addition to its importance to speech recognition, speaker diarization, and structural metadata extraction research, the corpus is also useful for linguistic analysis of conversational Czech

Challenges in speech processing of Slavic languages (case studies in speech recognition of Czech and

Abstract. Slavic languages pose a big challenge for researchers dealing with speech technology. They exhibit a large degree of inflection, namely declension of nouns, pronouns and adjectives, and conjugation of verbs. This has a large impact on the size of lexical inventories in these languages, and significantly complicates the design of text-to-speech and, in particular, speech-to-text systems. In the paper, we demonstrate some of the typical features of the Slavic languages and show how they can be handled in the development of practical speech processing systems. We present our solutions we applied in the design of voice dictation and broadcast speech transcription systems developed for Czech. Furthermore, we demonstrate how these systems can be converted to another similar Slavic language, in our case Slovak. All the presented systems operate in real time with very large vocabularies (350K words in Czech, 170K words in Slovak) and some of them have been already deployed in practice