Terms and Definitions

The following list defines some technical terms deemed important in the context of this cookbook

• Speech Corpus = physical time signals, in most cases sound pressure or other measurable time signals recorded from the act of speaking^1.3, together with an associated set of annotations, meta data and documentation stored on a digital medium.
• Validation = the (formal) check of a speech corpus with regard to its pre-defined specifications.
• Evaluation = a qualitative assessment of a corpus with regard to its usability in a certain task or development scenario.
• Specification = the fixed technical description of a speech corpus with regards to all of its features (including annotations, meta data and documentation).
• (File) Format = standardized or specified format of digital signal and symbolic (annotations, meta data) data.
• Annotation = discrete (categorized) description associated with a physical signal (coding). Usually consists of a closed set of symbols and a scheme to link these symbols to either points in time or segments in time.
• Domain = topics of verbal communication or the situation in which a verbal communication takes place.
• Prompt = speech item (word, phrase or sentence) presented to a speaker. A prompt list or prompt corpus is a collection of prompts that define the spoken content of the corpus.
• Spoken Content = what was spoken in a speech corpus.
• Meta data = data about data. In this book the term meta data is restricted to three types: recording protocols, comments and speaker profiles.
• Codes = categorized data entries, in contrast to free text. If for instance the meta data parameter place of birth is restricted to the German states and the category `other', then it is a code. A free comment about recording success is no code and therefore not machine readable.