Design and Development of Speech Corpora for Air Traffic Control Training

Abstract

The paper describes the process of creation of domain-specific speech corpora containing air traffic control (ATC) communication prompts. Since the ATC domain is highly specific both from the acoustic point-of-view (significant level of noise in the signal, non-native English accents of the speakers, non-standard pronunciation of some frequent words) and the lexical and syntactic perspective (prescribed structure of utterances, rather limited vocabulary), it is useful to collect and annotate data from this specific domain. Actually, the ultimate goal of the research effort of our team was to develop a voice dialogue system simulating the responses of the pilot that could be used for training aspiring air traffic controllers. In order to do so, we needed - among other modules - a domain-specific automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) engines. This paper concentrates on the details of the ASR and TTS corpora creation process but also overviews their usage in preparing practical applications and provides links to the distribution channel of the data.

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