Introduction

Research into Speech and Language needs large corpora of "natural" language.

Sizes

• hand-labeled speech data:
  ~50 kwords (~5 hours, IFA corpus)
• hand transliterated speech:
  ~10 Mwords (~1000 hours, Spoken Dutch Corpus, CGN)
• text corpora (newspapers, memo's, emails, ceefax):
  >100 Mwords
• Automatic Speech Recognition:
  ~250 Mwords unlabeled text
  ~50 kwords un-labeled speech (on-site recordings)
• Automatic Text-to-Speech synthesis:
  ~10 kwords per speaker (~1 hour of scripted, hand-aligned speech)

Issues

• complexity
  collecting, annotating, archiving, workflow
• people required
  many tasks require specialists
• copyrights, licenses, privacy
  blocks the use of many TV/radio broadcasts and newspaper texts
• distribution and access
  the Spoken Dutch Corpus (CGN) takes up 175 CDroms