NSLD

The National Spoken Language Database standing committee is the oldest ASSTA committee. It was established in 1990 to encourage and seek to coordinate the development of high quality databases of spoken language data. The terms of reference of the NSLD committee included the coordination of the creation of a national database of spoken language in Australia; the generation of publicity about the need for structured and easily accessible spoken language data among the research community and its potential funding bodies; the encouragement of all speech scientists and technologists in Australia to support this project; and the development of cooperation with similar endeavours overseas.

The Australian National Database of Spoken Language (ANDOSL) was a 3 year programme involving speaker selection, data collection, data analysis, data annotation, data management, description and dissemination, which utilised expertise on four sites and the Australian Academic Research Network (AARNET). The aim of the project was to provide a core database of English spoken in Australia using as few speakers as possible while still obtaining representative data. The language corpus contains both phonetically rich read speech and a spontaneous speech task (map task) with a focused vocabulary. Speakers were selected from well defined phonological clusters which included both the well recognised varieties of Australian English and, initially, two forms of accented Australian English. The data from this project will be continuously enhanced by additional material and additional annotation.

The committee is active in promoting new spoken language data resources which can be made available to the research community in technically compatible formats.

Committee:

Contact: [email protected]A