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Mandarin–English code-switching speech corpus in South-East Asia: SEAME

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Abstract

This paper introduces the South East Asia Mandarin–English corpus, a 63-h spontaneous Mandarin–English code-switching transcribed speech corpus suitable for LVCSR and language change detection/identification research. The corpus is recorded under unscripted interview and conversational settings from 157 Singaporean and Malaysian speakers who spoke a mixture of Mandarin and English within a single sentence. About 82 % of the transcribed utterances are intra-sentential code-switching speech and the corpus will be release by LDC in 2015. This paper presents an analysis of the code-switching statistics of the corpus, such as the duration of monolingual segments and the frequency of language turns in code-switch utterances. We also summarize the development effort, details such as the processing time for transcription, validation and language boundary labelling. Lastly, we present textual analyses of code-switch segments examining the word length of monolingual segments in code-switch utterances and the most common single word and two-word phrase of such segments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Temasek Laboratories, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 639798, Singapore

    Dau-Cheng Lyu, Eng-Siong Chng & Haizhou Li

  2. School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 639798, Singapore

    Eng-Siong Chng & Haizhou Li

  3. Institute for Infocomm Research, 1 Fusionopolis Way, Singapore, 138632, Singapore

    Haizhou Li

  4. School of Computer Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 11800, USM, Penang, Malaysia

    Tien-Ping Tan

  5. The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, 2052, Australia

    Haizhou Li

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  1. Dau-Cheng Lyu
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  2. Tien-Ping Tan
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  3. Eng-Siong Chng
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  4. Haizhou Li
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Correspondence to Dau-Cheng Lyu.

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Lyu, DC., Tan, TP., Chng, ES. et al. Mandarin–English code-switching speech corpus in South-East Asia: SEAME. Lang Resources & Evaluation 49, 581–600 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-015-9303-x

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