Gamli - Icelandic Oral History Corpus: Design, Collection and Evaluation

Luke O'Brien, Finnur Ágúst Ingimundarson, Jón Guðnasson, Steinþór Steingrímsson

Keywords: ASR, corpus, oral history, transcription, Icelandic, spontaneous speech

TL;DR: An ASR corpus and model for Icelandic oral histories

Abstract: We present Gamli, an ASR corpus for Icelandic oral histories, the first of its kind for this language, derived from the Ísmús ethnographic collection. Corpora for oral histories differ in various ways from corpora for general ASR, they contain spontaneous speech, multiple speakers per channel, noisy environments, the effects of historic recording equipment, and typically a large proportion of elderly speakers. Gamli contains 146 hours of aligned speech and transcripts, split into a training set and a test set. We describe our approach for creating the transcripts, through both OCR of previous transcripts and post-editing of ASR output. We also describe our approach for aligning, segmenting, and filtering the corpus and finally training a Kaldi ASR system, which achieves 22.4% word error rate (WER) on the Gamli test set, a substantial improvement from 58.4% word error rate from a baseline general ASR system for Icelandic.