The Dutch Dialect Database (also known as the ‘Nederlandse Dialectenbank’) contains dialectal variations of Dutch that were recorded all over the Netherlands in the second half of the twentieth century. A subset of these recordings of about 300 hours were enriched with manual orthographic transcriptions, using non-standard approximations of dialectal speech. In this paper we describe the creation of a corpus containing both the audio recordings and their corresponding transcriptions and focus on our method for aligning the recordings with the transcriptions and the metadata.

We developed a bilingual Frisian/Dutch speech recognizer for council meetings in Fryslân (the Netherlands). During these meetings both Frisian and Dutch are spoken, and code switching between both languages shows up frequently. The new speech recognizer is based on an existing speech recognizer for Frisian and Dutch named FAME!, which was trained and tested on historical radio broadcasts. Adapting a speech recognizer for the council meeting domain is challenging because of acoustic background noise, speaker overlap and the jargon typically used in council meetings. To train the new recognizer, we used the radio broadcast materials utilized for the development of the FAME! recognizer and added newly created manually transcribed audio recordings of council meetings from eleven Frisian municipalities, the Frisian provincial council and the Frisian water board. The council meeting recordings consist of 49 hours of speech, with 26 hours of Frisian speech and 23 hours of Dutch speech. Furthermore, from the same sources, we obtained texts in the domain of council meetings containing 11 million words; 1.1 million Frisian words and 9.9 million Dutch words. We describe the methods used to train the new recognizer, report the observed word error rates, and perform an error analysis on remaining errors.