DUTCH (The Netherlands)

Existing databases and their actors

• Experimental research

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  academics: GRONINGEN Corpus (basic research), BLOEMENDAL corpus, DEMSI corpus, Collections of speech recorded on analogue tapes. In coordination with the Reusable resources task group of ELSNET, the GRONINGEN corpus has been produced on CD-ROM for public distribution.

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  CEC: POLYGLOT, EUROM-0, EUROM-1, NOISE-ROM-0

• Application-oriented
• Telephone: Dutch POLYPHONE
• Lexica: CLEX (Dutch/German/English, distributed by SPEX and LDC)

Ongoing projects & new initiatives

• Experimental research: ``Dutch National Corpus'' (similar to BNC, 10 M words spoken material to be collected)
• Application-oriented: ONOMASTICA (EEC)
• Telephone

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  POLYPHONE: Dutch corpus of similar design, sponsored by SPEX and PTT Research.

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  SPEECHDAT (EEC)

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  NWO Priority Program: information system about public transportation via the telephone.

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  EUROCOCOSDA, COCOSDA

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  Eurescom related Telecom cooperation.

Conclusion

The speech community in Holland is very active. Active participation in ESCA (president is L. Pols), ELSNET, EAGLES, EUROCOCOSDA, COCOSDA. Strong cooperation between academics and telecom. Strong national effort. Industrial involvement unknown.
SPEX, the Dutch Speech Processing Expertise Centre located in Leidschendam, is interested to get involved, as the Dutch node, in a European infrastructure for database collection and exploitation. It distributes some corpora. EUROM-1 to be made available on CD-ROM.