On web-based creation of speech resources for less-resourced languages

Web-based creation of speech resources is a new paradigm for producing spoken language resources. It is particularly suited for less resourced languages, i.e. languages for which no readily available speech resources exist. This paper maps the speech resource creation tasks to the client-server architecture of the WWW. It presents two tools that have been developed for webbased speech resource creation, and it demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach by three use cases: 1) high bandwidth recordings of new speaker populations in geographically distributed locations, 2) recordings in adverse recording environments, e.g. hospitals, and 3) field recordings of endangered languages. The only infrastructure requirements are electricity for the equipment and an Internet connection.

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