RESUMEN
The Donate Speech campaign has so far succeeded in gathering approximately 3600 h of ordinary, colloquial Finnish speech into the Lahjoita puhetta (Donate Speech) corpus. The corpus includes over twenty thousand speakers from all the regions of Finland and from all age brackets. The primary goals of the collection were to create a representative, large-scale resource to study spontaneous spoken Finnish and to accelerate the development of language technology and speech-based services. In this paper, we present the collection process and the collected corpus, and showcase its versatility through multiple use cases. The evaluated use cases include: automatic speech recognition of spontaneous speech, detection of age, gender, dialect and topic and metadata analysis. We provide benchmarks for the use cases, as well downloadable, trained baseline systems with open-source code for reproducibility. One further use case is to verify the metadata and transcripts given in this corpus itself, and to suggest artificial metadata and transcripts for the part of the corpus where it is missing.
RESUMEN
Magnetic brain responses to speech sounds were measured in 10 healthy neonates. The stimulation consisted of a frequent vowel sound [a:] with a steady pitch contour, which was occasionally replaced by the vowel [i:] with a steady pitch, or the vowel [a:] with a rising pitch, manifesting a change of intonation. The magnetic mismatch-negativity response (MMNm) was obtained and successfully modelled to the speech sound quality change in all infants and to the intonation change in 6 infants. The present results indicate that auditory-cortex speech-sound discrimination may well be studied with magnetic recordings as early as in newborn infants.