GERMAN (Germany)

Existing databases and their actors

• Experimental research

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  Academics: basic (PHONDAT1), German Pronunciation Dictionary.

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  EEC: EUROM-1, EUROM-0, POLYGLOT

  Application-oriented
  

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  Academics: PHONDAT2, ERBA (train)

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  Industry: SUNSTAR (EEC)

• Telephone: Siemens Telephone Database

Ongoing projects & new initiatives

Various national, industrial, and EEC initiatives and cooperations, as:

• Experimental research

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  VERBMOBIL (basic, advanced) by industry and universities

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  VERBMOBIL-PHONDAT (advanced) by academics

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  TEDspeeches, TEDlaryngo (advanced), TEDphone by EUROCOCOSDA

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  Articulation of German Vowels (advanced)

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  Publicly Spoken German, very large database of german utterances

• Application-oriented

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  ONOMASTICA (EEC)

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  Siemens ``1000 read sentences'' by company/university

• Telephone

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  TEDphone (EUROCOCOSDA)

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  SPEECHDAT (EEC) POLYPHONE type German Corpus by Siemens

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  Stemmer Telephone Database

Conclusion

• Situation: German is very active. All actors are present. Many universities, many large companies, the national telecom, are involved in the domain.
• Needs: Basic research material is more or less available, but making EUROMs available could be important as part of a really multilingual corpus. Application-oriented corpora are requested by industrials.
• Dissemination: Spoken language resources in German are either free for any use, available for research only, available for project partners only (EEC projects), or of unknown availability. So it is clear that in Germany, commercialisation of linguistic resources is an important issue.