• Corpus ID: 246285403

The Norwegian Parliamentary Speech Corpus

@inproceedings{Solberg2022TheNP,
  title={The Norwegian Parliamentary Speech Corpus},
  author={Per Erik Solberg and Pablo Ortiz},
  booktitle={International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation},
  year={2022}
}

• Per Erik Solberg, Pablo Ortiz
• Published in
  International Conference on…
  26 January 2022
• Computer Science

The Norwegian Parliamentary Speech Corpus (NPSC) is a speech dataset with recordings of meetings from Stortinget, the Norwegian parliament. It is the first, publicly available dataset containing unscripted, Norwegian speech designed for training of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. The recordings are manually transcribed and annotated with language codes and speakers, and there are detailed metadata about the speakers. The transcriptions exist in both normalized and non-normalized form, and non-standardized words are explicitly marked and annotated with standardized equivalents. To test the usefulness of this dataset, we have compared an ASR system trained on the NPSC with a baseline system trained on only manuscript-read speech. These systems were tested on an independent dataset containing spontaneous, dialectal speech. The NPSC-trained system performed significantly better, with a 22.9% relative improvement in word error rate (WER). Moreover, training on the NPSC is shown to have a “democratizing” effects in terms of dialects, as improvements are generally larger for dialects with higher WER from the baseline system.