The CHAINS corpus: CHAracterizing INdividual Speakers

We present a novel speech corpus collected with the primary aim of facilitating research in speaker identification. The corpus features approximately 36 speakers recorded under a variety of speaking conditions, allowing comparison of the same speaker across different well-defined speech styles. Speakers read a variety of texts alone, in synchrony with a dialect-matched cospeaker, in imitation of a dialect-matched co-speaker, in a whisper, and at a fast rate. There is also an unscripted spontaneous retelling of a read fable. The bulk of the speakers were speakers of Eastern Hiberno-English. The corpus will be made freely available for research purposes.

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