Adding Metadata to Existing Parliamentary Speech Corpus

Abstract

Parliamentary proceedings are convenient data sources for creating corpora for speech technology. Given its public nature, there is an abundance of extra information about the speakers that can be legally and ethically harvested to enrich this kind of corpora. This paper describes the methods we have used to add speaker metadata to the Stortinget Speech Corpus (SSC) containing over 5,000 hours of Norwegian speech with non-verbatim transcripts but without speaker metadata. The additional metadata for each speech segment includes speaker ID, gender, date of birth, municipality of birth, and counties represented. We also infer speaker dialect from their municipality of birth using a manually designed mapping between municipalities and Norwegian dialects. We provide observations on the SSC data and give suggestions for how it may be used for tasks other than speech recognition. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of this new metadata through a dialect identification task. The described methods can be adapted to add metadata information to parliamentary corpora in other languages.