Actors in speech resource production

1. National and/or academic initiatives:

In every country where there is a history of speech research, academics (universities, speech research labs) produce the databases they need. However, these corpora tend to be specific to the needs of the producer and rest the property of the producer.

2. EEC initiatives:

EEC projects are a catalyst of production. Both for basic research and application-oriented databases, they are a way of developing links between academics and industry. Corpora also tend to remain the property of the consortium. As the conortium members are both academic/research and industrial, the needs cover all areas.

3. Telecommunication/telephone sectors:

Major telephone operators historically have been interested in speech technology, and most have their own research centers which collect the necessary corpora for their research activities. Most of these corpora are not publicly available.

4. Industry:

Companies developing or integrating speech products need application-oriented databases. This is true both at national and international level, where foreign languages represent viable market opportunities. The data that can be provided by industry is varied, but for the most part unknown, other than that resulting from EEC initiatives.

The more of these actors are present in a given country, the more we tend to find a developed speech community both with existing linguistic resources, but also with a strong demand for additional resources. As the speech community grows and the number of speech-based products extends, the amount of needed resources also grows.

   a) need 1.1, 1.2, 1.3        provide 1.1, 1.2 with a), b), c)
                                provide 1.3  with a)
 
   b) needs variable            provide 1.1, 1.2 with a), d)
                                provide 2 with c)
                                provide 3 with d), a)

   c) need 1.1, 2               provide 1.1 with a), b)
                                provide 2 with b)

   d) need 1.1, 1.2, 2, 3       provide 1), 2) with b)

So far, in reviewing the already existing resources, the presence of traditional actors, and the on-going projects, we assess the current situation as follows. Our starting consideration is that the under-represented European languages will need at minimum the resources that better-represented languages already have (at least the basic resources), and that well-represented languages will need still more resources. These needed resources will come from ongoing projects, and further needs can be foreseen through interviews with relevent actors in the speech research community and industry (ISC).