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KALAKA: A TV Broadcast Speech Database for the Evaluation of Language Recognition Systems

A speech database, named KALAKA, was created to support the Albayzin 2008 Evaluation of Language Recognition Systems, organized by the Spanish Network on Speech Technologies from May to November 2008. This evaluation, designed according to the criteria and methodology applied in the NIST Language Recognition Evaluations, involved four target languages: Basque, Catalan, Galician and Spanish (official languages in Spain), and included speech signals in other (unknown) languages to allow open-set verification trials. In this paper, the process of designing, collecting data and building the train, development and evaluation datasets of KALAKA is described. Results attained in the Albayzin 2008 LRE are presented as a means of evaluating the database. The performance of a state-of-the-art language recognition system on a closed-set evaluation task is also presented for reference. Future work includes extending KALAKA by adding Portuguese and English as target languages and renewing the set of unknown languages needed to carry out open-set evaluations.