Merkel Podcast Corpus: A Multimodal Dataset Compiled from 16 Years of Angela Merkel’s Weekly Video Podcasts

Debjoy Saha, Shravan Nayak, Timo Baumann

Abstract
We introduce the Merkel Podcast Corpus, an audio-visual-text corpus in German collected from 16 years of (almost) weekly Internet podcasts of former German chancellor Angela Merkel. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first single speaker corpus in the German language consisting of audio, visual and text modalities of comparable size and temporal extent. We describe the methods used with which we have collected and edited the data which involves downloading the videos, transcripts and other metadata, forced alignment, performing active speaker recognition and face detection to finally curate the single speaker dataset consisting of utterances spoken by Angela Merkel. The proposed pipeline is general and can be used to curate other datasets of similar nature, such as talk show contents. Through various statistical analyses and applications of the dataset in talking face generation and TTS, we show the utility of the dataset. We argue that it is a valuable contribution to the research community, in particular, due to its realistic and challenging material at the boundary between prepared and spontaneous speech.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.270
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
2536–2540
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.270
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Debjoy Saha, Shravan Nayak, and Timo Baumann. 2022. Merkel Podcast Corpus: A Multimodal Dataset Compiled from 16 Years of Angela Merkel’s Weekly Video Podcasts. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 2536–2540, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Merkel Podcast Corpus: A Multimodal Dataset Compiled from 16 Years of Angela Merkel’s Weekly Video Podcasts (Saha et al., LREC 2022)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2022.lrec-1.270.pdf
Code
 deeplsd/merkel-podcast-corpus
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