MD3: The Multi-Dialect Dataset of Dialogues
This provides a resource for researchers studying dialectal variations in conversational speech, though it is incremental as it builds on existing dataset creation efforts.
The authors tackled the lack of conversational speech datasets for cross-dialectal comparison by introducing MD3, a dataset with over 20 hours of audio and 200,000 transcribed tokens from English dialects in India, Nigeria, and the US, revealing significant differences in syntax and discourse markers.
We introduce a new dataset of conversational speech representing English from India, Nigeria, and the United States. The Multi-Dialect Dataset of Dialogues (MD3) strikes a new balance between open-ended conversational speech and task-oriented dialogue by prompting participants to perform a series of short information-sharing tasks. This facilitates quantitative cross-dialectal comparison, while avoiding the imposition of a restrictive task structure that might inhibit the expression of dialect features. Preliminary analysis of the dataset reveals significant differences in syntax and in the use of discourse markers. The dataset, which will be made publicly available with the publication of this paper, includes more than 20 hours of audio and more than 200,000 orthographically-transcribed tokens.