The DARPA TIMIT Acoustic-Phonetic Continuous Speech Corpus (Dataset)

The DARPA TIMIT Acoustic-Phonetic Continuous Speech Corpus (TIMIT) Training and Test Data The TIMIT corpus of read speech has been designed to provide speech data for the acquisition of acoustic-phonetic knowledge and for the development and evaluation of automatic speech recognition systems. TIMIT has resulted from the joint efforts of several sites under sponsorship from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - Information Science and Technology Office (DARPA-ISTO). Text corpus design was a joint effort among the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford Research Institute (SRI), and Texas Instruments (TI). The speech was recorded at TI, transcribed at MIT, and has been maintained, verified, and prepared for CD-ROM production by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). This file contains a brief description of the TIMIT Speech Corpus. Additional information including the referenced material and some relevant reprints of articles may be found in the printed documentation which is also available from NTIS (NTIS# PB91-100354). ## Corpus Speaker Distribution — —————————————- TIMIT contains a total of 6300 sentences, 10 sentences spoken by each of 630 speakers from 8 major dialect regions of the United States. Table 1 shows the number of speakers for the 8 dialect regions, broken down by sex. The percentages are given in parentheses. A speaker s dialect region is the geographical area of the U.S. where they lived during their childhood years. The geographical areas correspond with recognized dialect regions in U.S. (Language Files, Ohio State University Linguistics Dept., 1982), with the exception of the Western region (dr7) in which dialect boundaries are not known with any confidence and dialect region 8 where the speakers moved around a lot during their childhood. Table 1: Dialect distribution of speakers Dialect Region(dr) #Male #Female Total ————— ————- ————- ————— 1 31 (63%) 18 (27%) 49 (8%) 2 71 (70%) 31 (30%) 102 (16%) 3 79 (67%) 23 (23%) 102 (16%) 4 69 (69%) 31 (31%) 100 (16%) 5 62 (63%) 36 (37%) 98 (16%) 6 30 (65%) 16 (35%) 46 (7%) 7 74 (74%) 26 (26%) 100 (16%) 8 22 (67%) 11 (33%) 33 (5%) ——— ————- ————- ————— 8 438 (70%) 192 (30%) 630 (100%) The dialect regions are: dr1: New England dr2: Northern dr3: North Midland dr4: South Midland dr5: Southern dr6: New York City dr7: Western dr8: Army Brat (moved around) ## Corpus Text Material — —————————— The text material in the TIMIT prompts (found in the file "prompts.doc") consists of 2 dialect "shibboleth" sentences designed at SRI, 450 phonetically-compact sentences designed at MIT, and 1890 phonetically-diverse sentences selected at TI. The dialect sentences (the SA sentences) were meant to expose the dialectal variants of the speakers and were read by all 630 speakers. The phonetically-compact sentences were designed to provide a good coverage of pairs of phones, with extra occurrences of phonetic contexts thought to be either difficult or of particular interest. Each speaker read 5 of these sentences (the SX sentences) and each text was spoken by 7 different speakers. The phonetically-diverse sentences (the SI sentences) were selected from existing text sources - the Brown Corpus (Kuchera and Francis, 1967) and the Playwrights Dialog (Hultzen, et al., 1964) - so as to add diversity in sentence types and phonetic contexts. The selection criteria maximized the variety of allophonic contexts found in the texts. Each speaker read 3 of these sentences, with each sentence being read only by a single speaker. Table 2 summarizes the speech material in TIMIT. Table 2: TIMIT speech material Sentence Type #Sentences #Speakers Total #Sentences/Speaker ——————- ————— ————- ——- ————————— Dialect (SA) 2 630 1260 2 Compact (SX) 450 7 3150 5 Diverse (SI) 1890 1 1890 3 ——————- ————— ————- ——- ———————— Total 2342 6300 10 Suggested Training/Test Subdivision — —————————————————- The speech material has been subdivided into portions for training and testing. The criteria for the subdivision is described in the file "testset.doc". THIS SUBDIVISION HAS NO RELATION TO THE DATA DISTRIBUTED ON THE PROTOTYPE VERSION OF THE CDROM. ## Core Test Set: The test data has a core portion containing 24 speakers, 2 male and 1 female from each dialect region. The core test speakers are shown in Table 3. Each speaker read a different set of SX sentences. Thus the core test material contains 192 sentences, 5 SX and 3 SI for each speaker, each having a distinct text prompt. Table 3: The core test set of 24 speakers Dialect Male Female ———- ——— ——— 1 DAB0, WBT0 ELC0 2 TAS1, WEW0 PAS0 3 JMP0, LNT0 PKT0 4 LLL0, TLS0 JLM0 5 BPM0, KLT0 NLP0 6 CMJ0, JDH0 MGD0 7 GRT0, NJM0 DHC0 8 JLN0, PAM0 MLD0 ## Complete Test Set: A more extensive test set was obtained by including the sentences from all speakers that read any of the SX texts included in the core test set. In doing so, no sentence text appears in both the training and test sets. This complete test set contains a total of 168 speakers and 1344 utterances, accounting for about 27% of the total speech material. The resulting dialect distribution of the 168 speaker test set is given in Table 4. The complete test material contains 624 distinct texts. Table 4: Dialect distribution for complete test set Dialect #Male #Female Total ———- ——- ———- ——- 1 7 4 11 2 18 8 26 3 23 3 26 4 16 16 32 5 17 11 28 6 8 3 11 7 15 8 23 8 8 3 11 ——- ——- ———- ——— Total 112 56 168 CDROM TIMIT Directory and File Structure — ———————————————————— The speech and associated data is organized on the CD-ROM according to the following hierarchy: /////.

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The DARPA TIMIT Acoustic-Phonetic Continuous Speech Corpus (Dataset)