The Norwegian Parliamentary Speech Corpus
This provides a publicly available dataset for training ASR systems on unscripted Norwegian speech, addressing a domain-specific need for improved dialect handling, though it is incremental as it builds on existing ASR methods.
The researchers tackled the lack of unscripted Norwegian speech data for ASR by creating the Norwegian Parliamentary Speech Corpus, which when used for training improved word error rate by 22.9% on spontaneous, dialectal speech compared to a baseline trained on manuscript-read speech.
The Norwegian Parliamentary Speech Corpus (NPSC) is a speech dataset with recordings of meetings from Stortinget, the Norwegian parliament. It is the first, publicly available dataset containing unscripted, Norwegian speech designed for training of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. The recordings are manually transcribed and annotated with language codes and speakers, and there are detailed metadata about the speakers. The transcriptions exist in both normalized and non-normalized form, and non-standardized words are explicitly marked and annotated with standardized equivalents. To test the usefulness of this dataset, we have compared an ASR system trained on the NPSC with a baseline system trained on only manuscript-read speech. These systems were tested on an independent dataset containing spontaneous, dialectal speech. The NPSC-trained system performed significantly better, with a 22.9% relative improvement in word error rate (WER). Moreover, training on the NPSC is shown to have a "democratizing" effect in terms of dialects, as improvements are generally larger for dialects with higher WER from the baseline system.