Eliciting natural speech from non-native users: collecting speech data for LVCSR

In this paper, we discuss the design of a database of recorded and transcribed read and spontaneous speech of semi-fluent, stronglyaccented non-native speakers of English. While many speech applications work best with a recognizer that expects native-like usage, others could benefit from a speech recognition component that is forgiving of the sorts of errors that are not a barrier to communication; in order to train such a recognizer a database of non-native speech is needed. We examine how collecting data from non-native speakers must necessarily differ from collection from native speakers, and describe work we did to develop an appropriate scenario, recording setup, and optimal surroundings during recording.