ISCA Archive SALTMIL 2008
ISCA Archive SALTMIL 2008

Building a Basque/Spanish bilingual database for speaker verification

Iker Luengo, Eva Navas, Iñaki Sainz, Ibon Saratxaga, Jon Sanchez, Igor Odriozola, Juan J. Igarza, Inma Hernaez

Research groups aiming to record new speech databases for minority languages have to face a series of difficulties, such as the lack of previous resources, the scarcity of fluent speakers and the shortage of funding for the project. Sometimes it is possible to take advantage of recording campaigns for other projects, and extend them in order to make some recordings in that language for every contributor that is able to speak it. In this way, new databases can be recorded with little extra effort, as the campaign is already prepared and funded. Using this technique, a new Basque/Spanish bilingual database has been created. Thanks to this database, some research is being undertaken on Basque/Spanish bilingual speaker verification systems. We present a description of the resulting database and the difficulties encountered during its acquisition.