Design, Compilation and Processing of CUCall: A Set of Cantonese Spoken Language Corpora Collected Over Telephone Networks

The design and compilation of the CUCall telephone speech corpora is described in this paper. Speech database is an indispensable resource for research and development of state-of-the-art spoken language technology. These speech recognition systems rely greatly on a huge amount of well-designed and appropriately processed speech data for parameters training. On the other hand, as telephony applications are becoming more demanding and complicated, natural language interface is gaining more popularity than the traditional touch tone operation. Therefore, large telephone speech databases are required for such system building. Separate speech corpora are needed for telephone systems since there exist significant differences due to the channel difference. In this paper, we will describe the design and processing of a set of spoken language corpora for Cantonese that are collected over fixed line as well as mobile telephone networks. The corpora are intended as a versatile set of training data for general purpose application systems that adopt a statistical approach to spoken language processing. The designed set of corpora will be made up of over 1000 speaker calls.