An efficient algorithm to select phonetically balanced scripts for constructing a speech corpus

Here, we describe an efficient algorithm to select phonetically balanced scripts for collecting a large-scale multilingual speech corpus. It is expected to collect a multilingual speech corpus covering three most frequently used languages in Taiwan, including Taiwanese (Min-nan), Hakka, and Mandarin Chinese. To achieve the objective, the first step is to construct a multilingual phonetic alphabet, namely Formosa phonetic alphabet (ForPA). In addition, the multilingual lexicons (Fomosa lexicons) are also important parts for building the corpus. Until now, this corpus containing 600 speaker´s speech of Taiwanese (Min-nan) and Mandarin Chinese has been finished and ready to release. There contains about 40 hours of speech in 247 thousand utterances in this release.