The BDFALA corpus was jointly developed by INESC and CLUL in the framework of the national project sponsored by JNICT (Program Lusitânia).
Goal: enlargement of the EUROM.1 corpus, mainly for the improvement of speech synthesis systems.
6 types of corpus material were collected:
The 8 speakers were selected to achieve a balance in terms of sex, age groups and, as much as possible, among speakers of the EUROM.1 corpus. The two latter corpus types were only spoken by one male and one female speakers. A subset was also read by two young speakers (one male and one female), 12-14 years old, which were also recorded in EUROM.1.
Data collection took place in a sound-proof room. Two recording modes were adopted: in the case of isolated words and logatomes, the material was read from paper and recorded directly to DAT. The speech material was semi-automatically segmented and validated a posteriori. In the second mode (remaining sentences and paragraphs), a self-monitoring program was adopted which recorded directly into disc. The recordings were duly calibrated in both cases. The sampling frequency was 16 kHz.
For each spoken item, the corresponding orthographic script is saved in a separate ASCII file. A pronunciation lexicon with citation phonemic transcriptions for each word is also included. These were automatically produced and hand-corrected a posteriori.
The corpus material amounts to around 2.4 Gb, and is stored in 4 CDROMs.