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JASMIN-CGN: Extension of the Spoken Dutch Corpus with Speech of Elderly People, Children and Non-natives in the Human-Machine Interaction Modality

Large speech corpora (LSC) constitute an indispensable resource for conducting research in speech processing and for developing real-life speech applications. In 2004 the Spoken Dutch Corpus (CGN) became available, a corpus of standard Dutch as spoken by adult natives in the Netherlands and Flanders. Owing to budget constraints, CGN does not include speech of children, non-natives, elderly people and recordings of speech produced in human-machine interactions. Since such recordings would be extremely useful for conducting research and for developing HLT applications for these specific groups of speakers of Dutch, a new project, JASMIN-CGN, was started which aims at extending CGN in different ways: by collecting a corpus of contemporary Dutch as spoken by children of different age groups, non-natives with different mother tongues and elderly people in the Netherlands and Flanders and, in addition, by collecting speech material in a communication setting that was not envisaged in CGN: human-machine interaction. We expect that the knowledge gathered from these data can be generalized to developing appropriate systems also for other speaker groups (i.e. adult natives). One third of the data will be collected in Flanders and two thirds in the Netherlands.