THCHS-30 : A Free Chinese Speech Corpus
This provides accessible data for young or novice researchers in speech recognition, though it is incremental as it follows existing free data trends.
The authors released THCHS-30, a free Chinese speech corpus to lower barriers for new researchers, and established a baseline speech recognition system with reported performance under noisy conditions.
Speech data is crucially important for speech recognition research. There are quite some speech databases that can be purchased at prices that are reasonable for most research institutes. However, for young people who just start research activities or those who just gain initial interest in this direction, the cost for data is still an annoying barrier. We support the `free data' movement in speech recognition: research institutes (particularly supported by public funds) publish their data freely so that new researchers can obtain sufficient data to kick of their career. In this paper, we follow this trend and release a free Chinese speech database THCHS-30 that can be used to build a full- edged Chinese speech recognition system. We report the baseline system established with this database, including the performance under highly noisy conditions.