JNAS: Japanese speech corpus for large vocabulary continuous speech recognition research

In this paper we present the first public Japanese speech corpus for large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) technology, which we have titled JNAS (Japanese Newspaper Article Sentences). We designed it to be comparable to the corpora used in the American and European LVCSR projects. The corpus contains speech recordings (60 h) and their orthographic transcriptions for 306 speakers (153 males and 153 females) reading excerpts from the newspaper's articles and phonetically balanced (PB) sentences. This corpus contains utterances of about 45,000 sentences as a whole with each speaker reading about 150 sentences. JNAS is being distributed on 16 CD-ROMs.