SALA: SpeechDat across Latin America. Results of the First Phase
Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2000)
Abstract
The objective of the SALA (SpeechDat across Latin America) project is to record large SpeechDat-like databases to train telephone speech recognisers for any country in Latin America. The SALA consortium is composed by several European companies, (CSELT, Italy; Lernout & Hauspie, Belgium; Philips, Germany; Siemens AG, Germany; Vocalis, U.K.) and Universities (UPC Spain, SPEX The Netherlands). This paper gives an overview of the project, introduces the definition of the databases, shows the dialectal distribution in the countries where recordings take place and gives information about validation issues, actual status and practical experiences in recruiting and annotating such large databases in Latin America.