Recording Speech of Children, Non-Natives and Elderly People for HLT Applications: the JASMIN-CGN Corpus.

AbstractWithin the framework of the Dutch-Flemish programme STEVIN, the JASMIN-CGN (Jongeren, Anderstaligen en Senioren in Mens-machine Interactie’ Corpus Gesproken Nederlands) project was carried out, which was aimed at collecting speech of children, non-natives and elderly people. The JASMIN-CGN project is an extension of the Spoken Dutch Corpus (CGN) along three dimensions. First, by collecting a corpus of contemporary Dutch as spoken by children of different age groups, elderly people and non-natives with different mother tongues, an extension along the age and mother tongue dimensions was achieved. In addition, we collected speech material in a communication setting that was not envisaged in the CGN: human-machine interaction. One third of the data was collected in Flanders and two thirds in the Netherlands. In this paper we report on our experiences in collecting this corpus and we describe some of the important decisions that we made in the attempt to combine efficiency and high quality.