FT Speech: Danish Parliament Speech Corpus

TL;DR

FT Speech is a comprehensive Danish Parliament speech corpus with over 1,800 hours of spontaneous speech, significantly enhancing resources for Danish ASR research and demonstrating strong transferability in speech recognition tasks.

Contribution

The paper introduces FT Speech, a large-scale, spontaneous speech corpus for Danish, and evaluates its effectiveness for automatic speech recognition training.

Findings

Achieved 14.01 WER on the new corpus

FT Speech transfers well to in-domain language data

Provides a valuable resource for Danish ASR research

Abstract

This paper introduces FT Speech, a new speech corpus created from the recorded meetings of the Danish Parliament, otherwise known as the Folketing (FT). The corpus contains over 1,800 hours of transcribed speech by a total of 434 speakers. It is significantly larger in duration, vocabulary, and amount of spontaneous speech than the existing public speech corpora for Danish, which are largely limited to read-aloud and dictation data. We outline design considerations, including the preprocessing methods and the alignment procedure. To evaluate the quality of the corpus, we train automatic speech recognition systems on the new resource and compare them to the systems trained on the Danish part of Spr\r{a}kbanken, the largest public ASR corpus for Danish to date. Our baseline results show that we achieve a 14.01 WER on the new corpus. A combination of FT Speech with in-domain language data provides comparable results to models trained specifically on Spr\r{a}kbanken, showing that FT Speech transfers well to this data set. Interestingly, our results demonstrate that the opposite is not the case. This shows that FT Speech provides a valuable resource for promoting research on Danish ASR with more spontaneous speech.