THCHS-30 : A Free Chinese Speech Corpus

TL;DR

This paper introduces THCHS-30, a free Chinese speech corpus designed to support speech recognition research, especially for newcomers, and reports baseline performance including noisy conditions.

Contribution

It provides a publicly available Chinese speech dataset, facilitating accessible research and development in Chinese speech recognition.

Findings

Baseline system performance established

System tested under noisy conditions

Dataset supports full Chinese speech recognition development

Abstract

Speech data is crucially important for speech recognition research. There are quite some speech databases that can be purchased at prices that are reasonable for most research institutes. However, for young people who just start research activities or those who just gain initial interest in this direction, the cost for data is still an annoying barrier. We support the `free data' movement in speech recognition: research institutes (particularly supported by public funds) publish their data freely so that new researchers can obtain sufficient data to kick of their career. In this paper, we follow this trend and release a free Chinese speech database THCHS-30 that can be used to build a full- edged Chinese speech recognition system. We report the baseline system established with this database, including the performance under highly noisy conditions.