Subject: Downloadable simultaneous speaker corpus for CASA and ICA research From: Martin Cooke <m.cooke(at)DCS.SHEF.AC.UK> Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2002 12:23:10 +0100Announcing ShATR on the Web: a downloadable, multiple simultaneous speaker corpus. http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/research/groups/spandh/projects/shatrweb/index.htm l ShATR is a corpus of overlapped speech collected by the University of Sheffield Speech and Hearing Research Group in collaboration with ATR Japan in order to support research into computational auditory scene analysis and independent component analysis. The task involved four participants working in pairs to solve two crosswords. A fifth participant acted as a hint-giver. Eight channels of audio data were recorded from the following sensors: one close microphone per speaker, one omnidirectional microphone, and the two channels of a binaurally-wired mannekin. Around 41% of the corpus contains overlapped speech. In addition, a variety of other audio data was collected from each participant. The entire corpus, which has a duration of around 37 minutes, has been segmented and transcribed at 5 levels: task structure, nonspeech, sentence, word and phone. ShATR has been available on CDROM since 1995, but the growing interest in challenging multi-speaker domains led to the decision to release it on the web. The entire corpus is available, split into convenient 1 minute chunks in each of the 8 channels. Martin Cooke Speech & Hearing Research Department of Computer Science University of Sheffield, UK http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~martin