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The South African directory enquiries (SADE) name corpus

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Abstract

We present the design and development of a South African directory enquiries corpus. It contains audio and orthographic transcriptions of a wide range of South African names produced by first-language speakers of four languages, namely Afrikaans, English, isiZulu and Sesotho. Useful as a resource to understand the effect of name language and speaker language on pronunciation, this is the first corpus to also aim to identify the “intended language”: an implicit assumption with regard to word origin made by the speaker of the name. We describe the design, collection, annotation, and verification of the corpus. This includes an analysis of the algorithms used to tag the corpus with meta information that may be beneficial to pronunciation modelling tasks.

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  3. ISLRN 510-842-952-534-8, available from http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12185/378 under a Creative Commons Attribution License (3.0 Unported).

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Acknowledgements

This work is based on research supported by the Department of Arts and Culture (DAC) of the government of South Africa, through their Human Language Technologies (HLT) unit, and the National Research Foundation (NRF). Any opinion, finding and conclusion or recommendation expressed in this material is that of the authors and the NRF does not accept any liability in this regard. The support by both institutions is gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Multilingual Speech Technologies (MuST), Faculty of Engineering, North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa

    Jan W. F. Thirion, Charl van Heerden, Oluwapelumi Giwa & Marelie H. Davel

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  1. Jan W. F. Thirion
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  2. Charl van Heerden
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  3. Oluwapelumi Giwa
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  4. Marelie H. Davel
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Correspondence to Marelie H. Davel.

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Appendices

Appendices

1.1 Appendix 1: The SADE phone set

Table 13 provides a description of the SADE phoneme set as used to annotate the SADE corpus. For each phoneme, the corresponding IPA and X-SAMPA symbols are also provided.

Table 13 SADE phone set
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1.2 Appendix 2: Consent form

The following consent form was used during data collection:

figure e

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Thirion, J.W.F., van Heerden, C., Giwa, O. et al. The South African directory enquiries (SADE) name corpus. Lang Resources & Evaluation 54, 155–184 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-019-09448-6

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