We present spINAch, a large diachronic corpus of French speech from radio and television archives, balanced by speakers’ gender, age (20-95 years old), and spanning 60 years from 1955 to 2015. The dataset includes over 320 hours of recordings from more than two thousand speakers. The methodology for building the corpus is described, focusing on the quality of collected samples in acoustic terms. The data were automatically transcribed and phonetically aligned to allow studies at a phonemic level. More than 3 million oral vowels have been analyzed to propose their fundamental frequency and formants. The corpus, available to the community for research purposes, is valuable for describing the evolution of Parisian French through the representation of gender and age. The presented analyses also demonstrate that the diachronic nature of the corpus allows the observation of various phonetic phenomena, such as the evolution of voice pitch over time (which does not differ by gender in our data) and the neutralization of the /a/-/ɑ/ opposition in Parisian French during this period.

Audio and speech self-supervised encoder models are now widely used for a lot of different tasks. Many of these models are often trained on clean segmented speech content such as LibriSpeech. In this paper, we look into how the pretraining datasets of such SSL (Self-Supervised Learning) models impact their downstream results. We build a large pretraining corpus of highly diverse TV and Radio broadcast audio content, which we describe with automatic tools. We use these annotations to build smaller subsets, which we use to train audio SSL models. Then, we evaluate the models on multiple downstream tasks such as automatic speech recognition, voice activity and music detection, or speaker recognition. The results show the potential of pretraining SSL models on diverse audio content without restricting it to speech. We also perform a membership inference attack to evaluate the encoder ability to memorize their training datasets, which highlight the importance of data deduplication. This unified training could bridge speech and music machine learning communities.

Few speech resources describe interruption phenomena, especially for TV and media content. The description of these phenomena may vary across authors: it thus leaves room for improved annotation protocols. We present an annotation of Transition-Relevance Places (TRP) and Floor-Taking event types on an existing French TV and Radio broadcast corpus to facilitate studies of interruptions and turn-taking. Each speaker change is annotated with the presence or absence of a TRP, and a classification of the next-speaker floor-taking as Smooth, Backchannel or different types of turn violations (cooperative or competitive, successful or attempted interruption). An inter-rater agreement analysis shows such annotations’ moderate to substantial reliability. The inter-annotator agreement for TRP annotation reaches κ=0.75, κ=0.56 for Backchannel and κ=0.5 for the Interruption/non-interruption distinction. More precise differences linked to cooperative or competitive behaviors lead to lower agreements. These results underline the importance of low-level features like TRP to derive a classification of turn changes that would be less subject to interpretation. The analysis of the presence of overlapping speech highlights the existence of interruptions without overlaps and smooth transitions with overlaps. These annotations are available at https://lium.univ-lemans.fr/corpus-allies/.

Cette étude présente un test perceptif évaluant les indices permettant la planification de la prise de parole lors d’interactions orales spontanées. Des Unités Inter-Pauses (IPU) ont été extraites de dialogues du corpus REPERE et annotées en terminalité. Afin de déterminer quels paramètres affectent les jugements de la possibilité de prendre la parole, les stimulus ont été présentés sous forme audio ou textuelle.Les participant·es devaient indiquer la possibilité de prendre la parole «~Maintenant~», «~Bientôt~» ou «~Pas encore~», à la fin des IPU tronqués de 0 à 3 mots prosodiques. Les participant·es sont moins susceptibles de prendre la parole pour les frontières non terminales en modalité audio que textuelle. La modalité audio permet également d’anticiper une fin de tour de parole au moins trois mots avant sa fin, tandis que la modalité textuelle permet moins d’anticipation. Ces résultats soutiennent l’importance des indices contenus dans la parole pour la planification des interactions dialogiques.

InaGVAD is an audio corpus collected from 10 French radio and 18 TV channels categorized into 4 groups: generalist radio, music radio, news TV, and generalist TV. It contains 277 1-minute-long annotated recordings aimed at representing the acoustic diversity of French audiovisual programs and was primarily designed to build systems able to monitor men’s and women’s speaking time in media. inaGVAD is provided with Voice Activity Detection (VAD) and Speaker Gender Segmentation (SGS) annotations extended with overlap, speaker traits (gender, age, voice quality), and 10 non-speech event categories. Annotation distributions are detailed for each channel category. This dataset is partitioned into a 1h development and a 3h37 test subset, allowing fair and reproducible system evaluation. A benchmark of 6 freely available VAD software is presented, showing diverse abilities based on channel and non-speech event categories. Two existing SGS systems are evaluated on the corpus and compared against a baseline X-vector transfer learning strategy, trained on the development subset. Results demonstrate that our proposal, trained on a single - but diverse - hour of data, achieved competitive SGS results. The entire inaGVAD package; including corpus, annotations, evaluation scripts, and baseline training code; is made freely accessible, fostering future advancement in the domain.

This paper presents a semi-automatic approach to create a diachronic corpus of voices balanced for speaker’s age, gender, and recording period, according to 32 categories (2 genders, 4 age ranges and 4 recording periods). Corpora were selected at French National Institute of Audiovisual (INA) to obtain at least 30 speakers per category (a total of 960 speakers; only 874 have be found yet). For each speaker, speech excerpts were extracted from audiovisual documents using an automatic pipeline consisting of speech detection, background music and overlapped speech removal and speaker diarization, used to present clean speaker segments to human annotators identifying target speakers. This pipeline proved highly effective, cutting down manual processing by a factor of ten. Evaluation of the quality of the automatic processing and of the final output is provided. It shows the automatic processing compare to up-to-date process, and that the output provides high quality speech for most of the selected excerpts. This method is thus recommendable for creating large corpora of known target speakers.

Text and speech corpora for training a tale telling robot have been designed, recorded and annotated. The aim of these corpora is to study expressive storytelling behaviour, and to help in designing expressive prosodic and co-verbal variations for the artificial storyteller). A set of 89 children tales in French serves as a basis for this work. The tales annotation principles and scheme are described, together with the corpus description in terms of coverage and inter-annotator agreement. Automatic analysis of a new tale with the help of this corpus and machine learning is discussed. Metrics for evaluation of automatic annotation methods are discussed. A speech corpus of about 1 hour, with 12 tales has been recorded and aligned and annotated. This corpus is used for predicting expressive prosody in children tales, above the level of the sentence.