AISHELL-4: An Open Source Dataset for Speech Enhancement, Separation, Recognition and Speaker Diarization in Conference Scenario

TL;DR

AISHELL-4 is a comprehensive open-source Mandarin speech dataset recorded in conference scenarios, enabling research on multi-speaker processing, recognition, and diarization with realistic acoustics and detailed annotations.

Contribution

It introduces a large-scale, real-recorded Mandarin conference dataset with multi-task annotations and a baseline framework, filling a gap in non-English multi-speaker speech resources.

Findings

Provides realistic acoustics with natural speech variations.

Includes detailed annotations for speech and speaker activities.

Supports multi-task research in speech processing.

Abstract

In this paper, we present AISHELL-4, a sizable real-recorded Mandarin speech dataset collected by 8-channel circular microphone array for speech processing in conference scenario. The dataset consists of 211 recorded meeting sessions, each containing 4 to 8 speakers, with a total length of 120 hours. This dataset aims to bridge the advanced research on multi-speaker processing and the practical application scenario in three aspects. With real recorded meetings, AISHELL-4 provides realistic acoustics and rich natural speech characteristics in conversation such as short pause, speech overlap, quick speaker turn, noise, etc. Meanwhile, accurate transcription and speaker voice activity are provided for each meeting in AISHELL-4. This allows the researchers to explore different aspects in meeting processing, ranging from individual tasks such as speech front-end processing, speech recognition and speaker diarization, to multi-modality modeling and joint optimization of relevant tasks. Given most open source dataset for multi-speaker tasks are in English, AISHELL-4 is the only Mandarin dataset for conversation speech, providing additional value for data diversity in speech community. We also release a PyTorch-based training and evaluation framework as baseline system to promote reproducible research in this field.