Abstract
The MoveOn speech and noise database was purposely designed and implemented in support of research on spoken dialogue interaction in a motorcycle environment. The distinctiveness of the MoveOn database results from the requirements of the application domain—an information support and operational command and control system for the two-wheel police force—and also from the specifics of the adverse open-air acoustic environment. In this article, we first outline the target application, motivating the database design and purpose, and then report on the implementation details. The main challenges related to the choice of equipment, the organization of recording sessions, and some difficulties that were experienced during this effort, are discussed. We offer a detailed account of the database statistics, the suggested data splits in subsets, and discuss results from automatic speech recognition experiments which illustrate the degree of complexity of the operational environment.
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Notes
In earlier work (Winkler et al. 2008), published before the completion of the speech annotations, we estimated the amount of speech based on the speaker tier, i.e. including pauses at the beginning and end of each utterance, leading to a higher number of hours compared to the more precise number here.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the FP6 MoveOn project (IST-2005-034753), which was co-funded by the European Commission. The authors would like to acknowledge the significant effort that Dr. Rick Adderley from A ESolutions (BI) invested in the recruitment of professional police officers and in the supervision of the data recording campaign. Furthermore, the authors would like to thank Patrick Seidler and Mr. Ali Khan from University of Reading as well as Mr. Christian Bonkowski from the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems, who performed major parts of the annotation of the speech and noise tiers of the database. Sincere thanks also to University of Reading, Systema Technologies S.A. and the whole MoveOn project team for supporting the development of the database by detailed definitions and discussions of the project requirements, as well as all other colleagues who directly or indirectly contributed to the successful implementation of the MoveOn speech and noise database.
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Kostoulas, T., Winkler, T., Ganchev, T. et al. The MoveOn database: motorcycle environment speech and noise database for command and control applications. Lang Resources & Evaluation 47, 539–563 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-013-9222-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-013-9222-7