The CITRON database: Collection procedures and phonetic analysis of customer elicited speech over the telephone network

Abstract

The NYNEX artificial intelligence speech technology group is pursuing automation of operator services using speech technology. In order to automate portions of the directory assistance (DA) transaction, speaker‐independent recognition of isolated city names is currently under development. In the servioe of this project, a large database of New England city names has been collected. The city name responses over the telephone network (CITRON) database were collected to reflect speaker productions in a goal‐oriented man‐machine interaction. To collect this database, real customers were presented with digitized prompts requesting the target city name when they called DA. A total of 27 467 calls were collected over a 1‐month period. The CITRON database will be characterized along the following dimensions: total number of tokens, duration of tokens, number of phones and syllables per token, stress characteristics of each token, phonetic distribution of tokens, and derivable speaker characteristics. These results will be compared to the distribution of phones in the American English lexicon to characterize differences between the database and the English language.