Boston University Radio Speech Corpus

The Boston University Radio Speech Corpus was collected primarily to support research in text-to-speech synthesis, particularly generation of prosodic patterns. The corpus consists of professionally read radio news data, including speech and accompanying annotations, suitable for speech and language research. The corpus includes speech from seven (four male, three female) FM radio news announcers associated with WBUR, a public radio station. The main radio news portion of the corpus consists of over seven hours of news stories recorded in the WBUR radio studio during broadcasts over a two year period. In addition, the announcers were also recorded in a laboratory at Boston University. In this, the lab news portion, the announcers read a total of 24 stories from the radio news portion. The announcers were first asked to read the stories in their non-radio style and then, 30 minutes later, to read the same stories in their radio style. Each story read by an announcer was digitized in paragraph size units, which typically include several sentences. The files were digitized at a 16k Hz sample rate using a 16-bit A/D. The paragraphs were annotated with the orthographic transcription, phonetic alignments, part-of-speech tags and prosodic markers. The orthographic transcripts were generated by hand and include indication of where the speaker took a breath. The phonetic alignments and part-of-speech tags were generated automatically and hand corrected. The prosodic labels were marked by hand and are available only for a subset of the corpus. A zipped compressed file example.zip is available. Please be aware that this file is slightly larger than 1 Mb (1,278,998 bytes). An additional sample file, LDC1996.tgz and WAV sample are also available.