Spontal-N is a corpus of spontaneous, interactional Norwegian. To our knowledge, it is the first corpus of Norwegian in which the majority of speakers have spent significant parts of their lives in Sweden, and in which the recorded speech displays varying degrees of interference from Swedish. The corpus consists of studio quality audio- and video-recordings of four 30-minute free conversations between acquaintances, and a manual orthographic transcription of the entire material. On basis of the orthographic transcriptions, we automatically annotated approximately 50 percent of the material on the phoneme level, by means of a forced alignment between the acoustic signal and pronunciations listed in a dictionary. Approximately seven percent of the automatic transcription was manually corrected. Taking the manual correction as a gold standard, we evaluated several sources of pronunciation variants for the automatic transcription. Spontal-N is intended as a general purpose speech resource that is also suitable for investigating phonetic detail.

This paper describes the Norwegian broadcast news speech corpus RUNDKAST. The corpus contains recordings of approximately 77 hours of broadcast news shows from the Norwegian broadcasting company NRK. The corpus covers both read and spontaneous speech as well as spontaneous dialogues and multipart discussions, including frequent occurrences of non-speech material (e.g. music, jingles). The recordings have large variations in speaking styles, dialect use and recording/transmission quality. RUNDKAST has been annotated for research in speech technology. The entire corpus has been manually segmented and transcribed using hierarchical levels. A subset of one hour of read and spontaneous speech from 10 different speakers has been manually annotated using broad phonetic labels. We provide a description of the database content, the annotation tools and strategies, and the conventions used for the different levels of annotation. A corpus of this kind has up to this point not been available for Norwegian, but is considered a necessary part of the infrastructure for language technology research in Norway. The RUNDKAST corpus is planned to be included in a future national Norwegian language resource bank.

This paper describes the Norwegian speech database FonDat1 designedfor development and assessment of Norwegian unit selection speechsynthesis. The quality of unit selection speech synthesis systems depends highly on the database used. The database should contain sufficient phonemicand prosodic coverage. High quality unit selection synthesis alsorequires that the database is annotated with accurate information about identity and position of the units. Traditionally this involves much manual work, either by hand labelingthe entire database or by correcting automatic annotations. We are working on methods for a complete automation of the annotationprocess. To validate these methods a realistic unit selectionsynthesis database is needed. In addition to serve as a testbed for annotation tools and synthesisexperiments, the process of producing the database using automaticmethods is in itself an important result. FonDat1 contains studio recordings of approximately 2000 sentencesread by two professional speakers, one male and one female. 10% ofthe database is manually annotated.