The design of a large vocabulary speech corpus for portuguese

The last years show a great development of large vocabulary, speaker-independent continuous speech recognition systems and some research in multilingual aspects. To allow that development to also be extended to the European Portuguese language we decided to develop and collect a large database of continuous speech based on a large amount of text. In the development of this new Portuguese database our aim was to create a corpus equivalent in size to WSJ0. We selected the database texts from the P UBLICO newspaper, which is characterized by a broad coverage of matters and di erent writing styles. The recording population was selected from a large engineering school, assuring a large variability of speakers. The recordings are being done as we write this paper and we expect to release the database in CD format in September 1997.