Introduction
CIEMPIESS (Corpus de Investigación en Español de México del Posgrado de Ingeniería Eléctrica y Servicio Social) was developed by the Speech Processing Laboratory of the Faculty of Engineering at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and consists of approximately 18 hours of Mexican Spanish radio speech, associated transcripts, pronouncing dictionaries and language models. The goal of this work was to create acoustic models for automatic speech recognition.
For more information and documentation see the CIEMPIESS-UNAM Project website.
Data
The speech recordings are from 43 one-hour FM radio programs broadcast by Radio IUS, a UNAM radio station. They are comprised of spontaneous conversations between a radio moderator and guests, principally about legal issues. Approximately 78% of the speakers were males, and 22% of the speakers were females.
The audio was recorded in MP3 stereo format, using a 44.1 kHz sample rate and a bit-rate of 128 kbps or higher. Only "clean" utterances were selected from the raw data, meaning that the utterances were made by one only person with no background noises, whispers, music, foreign accents, white noise or static. The audio files were converted to 16 kHz, 16-bit PCM WAV format for this release.
The recordings were transcibed using PRAAT, a tool designed for phonetics research. The transcripts are in Mexbet, a phonetic alphablet designed for Mexican Spanish based on Worldbet (Hieronymus, 1994). Plain text transcripts, textgrid format time labels and files useful for performing experiments with the SPHINX3 recognition software are also included. |