11.1. Corpus Structure: A Case Study

The TIMIT Corpus was the first annotated speech database to be widely distributed, and it has an especially clear organization. TIMIT was developed by a consortium including Texas Instruments and MIT, from which it derives its name. It was designed to provide data for the acquisition of acoustic-phonetic knowledge and to support the development and evaluation of automatic speech recognition systems.

11.1.1. The Structure of TIMIT

Like the Brown Corpus, which displays a balanced selection of text genres and sources, TIMIT includes a balanced selection of dialects, speakers, and materials. For each of eight dialect regions, 50 male and female speakers having a range of ages and educational backgrounds each read 10 carefully chosen sentences. Two sentences, read by all speakers, were designed to bring out dialect variation: