NameDat: A Database of English Proper Names Spoken by Native Norwegians

Line Adde, Torbjørn Svendsen


Abstract
This paper describes the design and collection of NameDat, a database containing English proper names spoken by native Norwegians. The database was designed to cover the typical acoustic and phonetic variations that appear when Norwegians pronounce English names. The intended use of the database is acoustic and lexical modeling of these phonetic variations. The English names in the database have been enriched with several annotation tiers. The recorded names were selected according to three selection criteria: the familiarity of the name, the expected recognition performance and the coverage of non-native phonemes. The validity of the manual annotations was verified by means of an automatic recognition experiment of non-native names. The experiment showed that the use of the manual transcriptions from NameDat yields an increase in recognition performance over automatically generated transcriptions.
Anthology ID:
L10-1173
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)
Month:
May
Year:
2010
Address:
Valletta, Malta
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Mike Rosner, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/255_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Line Adde and Torbjørn Svendsen. 2010. NameDat: A Database of English Proper Names Spoken by Native Norwegians. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
NameDat: A Database of English Proper Names Spoken by Native Norwegians (Adde & Svendsen, LREC 2010)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/255_Paper.pdf