BREF, a Large Vocabulary Spoken Corpus for French

Abstract

This paper presents some of the design considerations of BREF, a large read-speech corpus for French. BREF was designed to provide continuous speech data for the development of dictation machines, for the evaluation of continuous speech recognition systems (both speaker-dependent and speakerindependent) , and for the study of phonological variations. The texts to be read were selected from 5 million words of the French newspaper, Le Monde. In total, 11,000 texts were selected, with selection criteria that emphasisized maximizing the number of distinct triphones. Separate text materials were selected for training and test corpora. Ninety speakers have been recorded, each providing between 5,000 and 10,000 words (approximately 40-70 min.) of speech. INTRODUCTION One of the main obstacles to progress in continuous speech recognition has been the lack of sufficient speech material for the training, development, and testing of algorithms and systems, as well as for the the study of speech..