Phonetically Rich Hindi Sentence Corpus for Creation of Speech Database
Vishal Chourasia Samudravijaya K
School Of Computers Tata Institute of Fundamental
IPS Academy, Indore Research, Mumbai,
INDIA 452012 INDIA 400005
chourasiavishal@yahoo.com chief@tifr.res.in
Abstract
This paper reports on methodology used in the
generation of a phonetically rich Hindi text corpus.
The corpus will be used as a resource for creation
of a continuous speech, multi-speaker, and large
vocabulary speech database for Hindi Language.
The larger goal is to facilitate the recognition of
large vocabulary, continuous spoken fluently by
any native speaker. This paper describes the
design, structure and phonetic analysis of text
corpus for Hindi. An analysis of the phonetic
richness of sentences designed by this method is
provided.
1 Introduction
There are many applications that require high
accuracy continuous speech recognition of spoken
sentences. Statistical models used for recognition
of speech signal need to be trained with a large
amount of speech data corresponding to sentences
containing all phonemes of the language in all
valid phonetic contexts. Thus, it is necessary to
have databases which comprise of appropriate
sentences spoken by the typical users in realistic
acoustic environment. Speech databases can be
divided into two groups: (i) a database of speech
normally spoken in a specific task domain. In this
case, small amount of speech is sufficient to
achieve acceptable recognition accuracy. (ii) a
general purpose speech database that is not tuned
to a particular task domain but consists of general
text and hence can be used for recognition of any
sentence in that language. To construct this kind of
speech database, a phonetically rich set of
sentences based on large text database should be
extracted. Previously such a speech database for
Hindi was developed [1]. However, the size and
scope of this database is limited. Thus, there is a
need for larger database. The problem with most
speech recognition systems is insufficient training
data, containing speaking variation (spontaneous
speech) caused by speaker variances (cover large
no of speakers). To overcome these problem, a
large vocabulary speech database is required to
Manohar Chandwani
IET , Devi Ahilya
Vishwavidalaya, Indore,
INDIA 452011
mc.iet@dauniv.ac.in
achieve a robust recognition. The purpose of
selection of phonetically-rich sentences is to
provide a good coverage of pairs of phones in the
sentence. The current work paves way for
generation of a database of Hindi speech that will
facilitate for acoustic phonetic studies, training and
testing of automatic speech Recognition systems. It
is hoped that the availability of this speech corpus
would also stimulate the basic research in Hindi
acoustic-phonetics and phonology.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. An
outline of the design of phonetically rich sentences
is given in section 2. The grapheme to phoneme
conversion and the process of designing
phonetically rich sentences are described in section
3. An analysis of phonetic richness of sentences in
the text corpus is given in section 4. Some
conclusions are drawn in section 5.
2 Creation of sentence corpus
Speech Recognition is a special case of supervised
pattern recognition. So, the models of speech
recognition have to be trained with speech data that
are tagged with their phonetic identity. For speaker
independent speech recognition, speech data need
to be collected from a large number of speakers. It
is not practical to ask speakers to speak/read a lot
of sentences that contain all phonemes (in various
phonetic contexts) of the language. Hence, it is
desirable to construct sets of sentences that are
phonetically rich. This construction is a laborious
task and is best automated. For such an automatic
or semi-automatic process of designing sentences,
an adequate corpus of text in the target language is
a primary requirement. This section describes the
methodology adapted to generate such a text
corpus for Hindi language.
2.1 An outline of the design process
Phonetically rich sentences can be selected from a
large set of text. Traditional sources of text data are
books, magazines and periodicals. However we
need a textual data in electronic form so that it can
be processed by a computer. So we have two
choices: (a) Manually type in the printed data from A Devnagri grapheme is represented by a code that
articles, periodical, magazines etc., and store it in is either 2 or 3 bytes long. All vowel modifiers
electronic form. (b) Use available online sources of ¤maa~a¥ and most pure consonants are encoded
text data. Example of such sources are articles on using 2 bytes. The two-byte codes cover most of
web and online news papers. There are several the Hindi graphemes.
online newspapers that provide content in Hindi
language using the Devnagri script. Examples of Three byte sequences represent the stand alone
such electronic newspapers/magazines are
webdunia, prabhasakshi, samachar, BBC, vowels [A‚ Aa,,‚ e‚ eo‚ ]‚ }], some consonants
haribhoomi, amarujala, hindimilap, navbharat [C‚ ja‚ xa‚ ca‚ T‚ D ] and “danda viram” (full stop)
times etc. Each online content uses its own
grapheme encoding scheme to display Hindi text [.].
using Devngari fonts. To collect a large amount of
text data we have used the Hindi news archives Unlike the Roman script, the Devnagri script is not
available at [2], and a few Hindi articles on the linear. Ligatures represent consonant clusters.
internet. We have collected the 3 years of textual Moreover, the script is not causal. The order of
data of the newspaper to make a big text corpus. display of graphemes do not strictly represent the
The online textual data available on the archive order of phonemes of the language. Thus, special
uses a Devnagri font named “sudipto”. In order to care has to be taken while writing the G2P
compute the phonetic richness of sentences and program. Such special features of Devnagri script
select sentences, the Hindi text in sudipto font (and are illustrated below.
the corresponding phoneme sequence) has to be
Byte Symbol Grapheme Description
represented using Roman symbols. However, such
Sequence
a grapheme to phoneme conversion programme for
195 151 i i small “i”
the sudipto font was not available. Also,
spelling ¤maa~a¥
information about the coding scheme was not
readily available. Hence a grapheme-to-phoneme
(G2P) program was written that takes care of most 194 174 n n Consonant half
conventions of the sudipto font. After G2P “n”
conversion, short sentences (with 4-9 words) 195 150 a a Vertical bar
filtered for possible inclusion in the text corpus. A (vowel /a/)
sentence selection software was used to pick up completion of
those short sentences from the big corpus that character “na”
satisfy the design constraints. A software 194 164 d d Consonant /d/
(“devnag”) [4] was used to generate a postscript 195 188 a Schwa for
file that displays the selected Hindi sentences in completion of
Devnagri script. Then, these sentences are character “da”
manually validated and edited to ensure 195 150 a Vertical bar
grammatical and spelling correctness.
a
(part of
grapheme
3 Grapheme to phoneme conversion cluster to
represent /r/ and
A grapheme is the smallest unit of written /o/
language. The set of graphemes consists of all of 195 172 ro Rapha with
the letters and letter combinations that represent ao-
spelling ¤maa~a¥
phonemes of the language. Hindi uses character
“o”
based Devnagri script; a Devnagri character
195 130 S Y Consonant half
represents either a standalone vowel or vowel in
“sh”
combination with one or more consonants. The
195 150 a a Vertical bar for
sudipto font employs UTF-8 encoding scheme.
completion of
The G2P involves generating Roman symbols
character “sha”
representing Hindi phonemes from the UTF-8
code. Table 1 G2P conversion of word inadao-Ya
A grapheme in UTF-8 is represented as a sequence Consider the process of grapheme to phoneme
of length 1 to 6 bytes. In the current case, all
conversion of the word nirdoSa ¤ inadao-Ya ¥
ASCII characters are represented as a single byte.
(meaning: innocent) .In case of Sudipto font, the
input byte sequence of the word corresponds to the
following decimal representation.
195 151 194 174 195 150 194 164 195 188 195
150 195 172 195 130 195 150
Table 1 illustrates the grapheme to phoneme
conversion according to the byte sequence
generated for the word ‘nirdoSa’ ¤ inadao-Ya ¥.
According to this table, a simple minded
conversion of byte sequence to symbol sequence
will generate ´i n a d a a r o S a` because this
corresponds to the sequence of graphemes as
normally written. While writing ´nirdoSa ¤inadao-Ya¥ in
Hindi, ´i’ ¤i ¥ matra is written first because it
precedes the consonant /n/ although, in spoken
language, the vowel follows the consonant. Then
consonant ´n’ and ‘a’ for ¤n ¥ and ¤a¥ which
constructs the character ¤na¥.Then ´da’ and ´a’ ¤d¥
followed by matra ´ro’ with rapha ´r’ as ¤ao-¥ and
word completion ´Sa’ for ¤Ya¥. The G2P conversion
program has to manage this violation of causality
and generate the correct sequence of phonemes of
the text.
In the above example, notice that the two byte
sequences represent a single phoneme; the vowel
'a' with byte sequence 195 188 is coming after ‘d’
(194 164) for the completion of the character /da/.
The consonant ΄S‘ (195 130) is also followed by
΄a‘ (195 150) for its completion ΄Sa‘, In this way
Devnagri characters are constructed as
combinations of graphemes.
There are words where a grapheme is represented
by a 3-byte sequence. For example, when a word
begins with an vowel (a ‘standalone’ vowel), the
vowel is represented by a special grapheme. These
are encoded by 3 byte long codes.
3.1 Phoneme with multiple graphemes
In Hindi language, some phonemes are associated
with multiple grapheme. Such a phoneme is
represented differently in written language, but its
pronunciation is same. Such different graphemes
used in distinct contexts such as in combination
with annuswar, consonants or vowels. A notable
example of such phonemes is /r/; there are many
while graphemes representing /r/ in different
phonemic contexts. Each such grapheme is
allocated a unique 2-byte long UTF-8 code. For
example, the phoneme /r/ in each of the following
words is associated with different graphemes: kr
[k a r (tax)]Ê nao~ [n e t r a (eye)]Ê raYT/ [r aa S t r a
(nation)]Ê $maala [r u m aa l (handkerchief)]Ê saMpk-
[s a m p a r k (contact)]Ê paik-Mga [p aa r k I ng
(parking)] Ê pdo- [p a r d e (curtain)]Ê dRYTI [d r I s t I
(eye-sight)]Ê Ëma [k r a m (sequence)]Ê ?Na [R N
(loan)]. The phoneme sequence as well as the
English word corresponding to a word is shown
inside the square bracket after the script.
3.2 Criteria for selection of sentences
We have adopted a certain criteria to select the
sentences for the dictionary creation. Only short
sentences (with a minimum of 4 and maximum of
10 words) are picked from the large text corpus.
The sentences are manually inspected to see that
does not sound artificial, the sentence is
meaningful, it must not contain any offensive or
sensitive words. Only those sentences which fulfill
all the above criteria are retained.
3.3 Phonetic Richness of Sentences
Phonetic rich sentences are needed for robust
estimation of the parameters statistical models of
context sensitive phonemes. A phoneme is context
sensitive if it is associated with several models
depending on the identity of the preceding and/or
following phoneme. A triphone is characterized by
both left and right context. If there are M
phonemes in a language, there can be Mⁿ
triphones; where (n=3). A language may not permit
all Mⁿ triphones; where (n=3), though.
A set of sentences is considered to be phonetically
rich if it contains all permissible triphones of the
language in sufficient quantity. While some
triphones occur abundantly in natural sentences,
quite a few triphones are rare. Thus one has to
design/select sentences which are rich in such rare
triphones.
For developing speaker independent recognition
system, it is necessary to collect speech data for a
large number of speakers. However speakers are
generally reluctant to read a large set of sentences.
Hence the primary goal of this work is to generate
small set of sentences, each of which can be
conveniently read by one person. It is not possible
to cover all triphones in one small sentence set.
Hence in this work, we consider a sentence set to
be phonetically rich if it contains most, if not all,
phonemes of the language. Thus, special effort has
to be taken to have as many words with rare
phonemes as possible.
3.4 Transliteration convention
The collected set of sentences is first converted to
devnagri convention. We converted the roman
symbols representing Hindi phonemes into its
corresponding devnagri script according to
Velthuis Transliteration scheme[4]. This helped us
to visualize the text in Devnagri script and validate
the text. In addition, speakers find it convenient to
read Hindi sentences in Devnagari script.
3.5 Selection of sentences
In order to create a large phonetically rich speech
database, collection of large amount of text corpus
is a prerequisite. Here, we took sentences from
online news and articles from the web. This helped
us in the collection of around 350,000 sentences
each containing between 4 and 10 words. A
sentence should contain a minimum of 4 words so
that it forms a standalone phrase or a sentences.
Similarly, the maximum number of words is
restricted to 10 because long sentences tend to be
complex and it is difficult for reader to read such
sentences fluently and naturally.
3.5.1 Sentence selection tool
After collection of large number of sentences, there
is need to select those sentences which are
phonetically rich in the sense that all the phonemes
must be present at least once in each the sentence
set. In order to achieve this, we used the corpus
selection program “corpusCrt” program [3]. Given
a text corpus, this software tool generates sets of
phonetic rich sentences that satisfies (as far as
possible) the phonetic context criteria specified by
the user. In our case, we have collected 50,000
phonetically rich sentences (5000 sets of sentences;
each set contains 10 sentences). In other words, on
an average, one out of seven sentences is selected
by the program. Each set of 10 sentences contains
almost all the phonemes of the Hindi language.
After applying corpusCrt tool on a corpus of
sentences, statistics of the selected sentence are
gathered. These are number of distinct units
(phones) in each sentence set, frequency of
occurrence of each phone, frequently occurring
phone as well as rarely occurring phone and total
number of units (phones) in a set.
4 Corpus Analysis
>From a set of 350,000 sentences, corpusCrt
sentence selection tool selected 5000 sets of
phonetically rich sentences; each set contains 10
sentences. So we have a collection of 50000
sentences which are phonetically rich which
comprises of 41 phonemes of Hindi language. The
collected sentences are said to be as phonetically
rich, most of (preferably all) 41 phonemes are
present in each and every sentence set.
4.1 Phonetic richness of sentence sets
Statistics is gathered about the number of distinct
phoneme in each sentence set. There are 41 distinct
phonemes in the present analysis. It may be noted
that there are 10 asphirated plosives in Hindi (5
voiced and 5 unvoiced). The voiced aspirated
plosives occur rarely. Figure 1 shows the phonetic
richness of the sentence sets in the form of a
histogram. It shows the frequency count of
sentence sets (out of 5000) that contain different of the sentences sets. Analysis of the sentence sets
number of distinct phonemes. The number of with this criterion yields 10 rare phonemes, out of
distinct phonemes (in a sentence set) is shown on the 41 phonemes of Hindi language.
the x-axis, and the percentage of sentence sets
containing that many distinct phonemes is on y- 5 Conclusion
axis of the histogram. It is found that about 4% of
Training of statistical models for automatic speech
the sentence sets contain all the 41 phonemes.
recognition requires large amount of speech data
Only one phoneme is missing in the 16% of sets.
that is rich in phonetic context. It is possible to
The percentage of sentence sets containing 38 and
design small sets of sentences that are not only
39 distinct phonemes are 25% and 27%
phonetically rich but also convenient for speakers
respectively. Histogram shows that almost 72% of
to read. In this work, a nearly automatic method
sets contain at least 37 distinct phonemes. Thus the
has been employed to design 50,000 such
sentence sets derived in this work are phonetically
sentences, starting from online texts that are coded
rich. It may be noted that every sentence set
for display in Devnagari script. The methodology
contains a minimum of 32 distinct phonemes.
is scalable to generation of larger corpus.
Collection of speech data using these sentences
4.2 Distribution of rare phonemes
would lead to development of better performing
Hindi Speech Recognition systems.
After gathering the statistics of distinct phonemes
in sentence sets, we identified rare phonemes
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~mgk25/unicode.html