CSR-III Speech

<p>CSR-III Speech, the third ARPA Continuous Speech Recognition (CSR) Benchmark Speech Test Collection, is a three CD-ROM set that contains complete development, test and evaluation test sets for speaker-independent, large-vocabulary speech recognition systems.</p><br>
<p>The development and evaluation tests share a common structure, consisting of two core test components ("hubs") and seven specialized test components ("spokes"). The hub tests, which were mandatory for all ARPA CSR participants in the November 1994 evaluations, provide a baseline for ASR performance, while the spokes provide the means for assessing the impact of particular speaking conditions or processing strategies in relation to baseline performance. Participants were free to take any combination of spoke tests according to their research interests. Taken together, the collection encompasses 180 speakers, each producing 20-40 sentences. These are organized into two complete development test sets and one evaluation set.</p><br>
<p>The collection also includes complete documentation on the test specifications, data collection procedures, transcriptions and scoring protocols, together with the latest available version of NIST software for scoring ASR results and managing SPHERE waveform files. All speech data is accompanied by both the prompting texts and the detailed orthographic transcriptions of the utterances.</p><br>
<p>This was the first ARPA CSR benchmark test in which prompting texts were drawn from a variety of English news sources. Whereas earlier benchmarks were based on Wall Street Journal (WSJ) excerpts from the period 1987-89, CSR-III prompts are from a variety of North American Business News Services: Reuters News Service, New York Times, Wahington Post and Los Angeles Times as well as WSJ; all texts are drawn from financial news articles written during the period of April through June 1994. (NAB stands for "North American Business," in contrast to earlier benchmarks and training collections labeled "WSJ").</p><br>
<p>A companion to the 1994 Benchmark Speech data collection is the four-disk CSR-III Text Collection (<a href="http://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC95T6" rel="nofollow">LDC95T6</a>), which includes the ARPA CSR 1994 Standard Language Model. This corpus is also available from the LDC as a 1995 release.</p></br>
Portions © 1994 Dow Jones & Company, Inc., Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service, Inc., New York Times, Reuters America, Inc., © 1994, 1995 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania