Road Rally

The Road Rally corpus was designed for the development and testing of word-spotting systems and was collected in a conversational domain using a road rally planning task as the topic. The corpus actually consists of two sub-corpora: "Stonehenge" and "Waterloo." The Stonehenge corpus contains road rally planning conversations as well as some read speech collected using high quality microphones and a telephone-simulating filter. The Waterloo corpus contains read road rally planning domain speech which was collected using actual telephone lines.<li><b>Stonehenge</b></li> The Stonehenge corpus was collected from subjects using telephone handsets which were modified to contain a high quality microphone. To gather conversational data, two talkers were located in separate rooms, given a road map and asked to participate in a road rally planning task. Their objective was to form a path between two locations on the map which would maximize their road rally point score. They were also given a time limit in which to complete the task to increase their responsiveness. Their speech was recorded on a stereo tape recorder with each subject's speech on a separate track. The tracks were digitized and the speech was edited to remove silences longer than a second or so. This resulted in approximately three minutes of continuous speech per subject. The speech was filtered using a 300Hz to 3300Hz PCM FIR bandpass filter to simulate telephone bandwidth quality. The Stonehenge corpus consists of 80 speakers; 28 females and 52 males.<li><b>Waterloo</b></li> The Waterloo corpus was collected as an extension to Stonehenge to provide similar domain speech under different conditions. The corpus was collected from subjects using conventional telephones and dialed up telephone lines in the Massachussetts area. Unlike the Stonehenge speech, the Waterloo speech is naturally band-limited by the telephones/lines but for consistency, the speech was also filtered using the Stonehenge 300Hz to 3300Hz PCM FIR bandpass filter. The corpus consists of 56 speakers (28 males and 28 females) each reading aloud a paragraph of road rally domain speech.</br>