Corpus of North American Spoken English

The Corpus of North American Spoken English (CoNASE) is a 1.25-billion-word corpus of geolocated automatic speech recognition (ASR) YouTube transcripts from the United States and Canada, created for the study of lexical, grammatical, and discourse-pragmatic phenomena of spoken language, including their geographical distribution, in North American English. The size of the corpus allows rare phenomena to be considered, and because the annotation includes the video IDs of transcripts, search hits can be manually inspected and video or audio data can be accessed. As the starting point of a scripting pipeline, the corpus can also be used for large-scale acoustic analyses of North American speech.

The corpus was created from 301,846 ASR transcripts from 2,572 YouTube channels, corresponding to 154,041 hours of video. The size of the corpus is 1,294,885,016 word tokens. The channels sampled in the corpus are associated with local government entities such as town, city, or county boards and councils, school or utility districts, regional authorities such as provincial or territorial governments, or other governmental organizations. The transcripts are primarily of recordings of public meetings, although other genres are also present. Video transcripts have been assigned exact latitude-longitude coordinates using a geocoding script.