The voice across Japan database-the Japanese language contribution to Polyphone

Texas Instruments´ Voice Across Japan (VAJ) database, modeled after the highly successful Voice Across America project, consists of a wide range of diverse speech material including digit strings, yes/no questions, and phonetically-rich read sentences. The data is being collected using long distance telephone lines and an analog telephone interface. The target size is 14 items per speaker by 10,000 speakers. Greater emphasis is being placed on the collection of phonetically-rich read sentence data. Four randomly selected sentences are included in each session: one from the 512 sentence ATR PB set, and three from a 10,000 sentence set developed specifically for this project. This latter sentence set, designed to maximize the triphone coverage of the database, is described. The VAJ database is planned to be included in the Linguistic Data Consortium´s (LDC) Polyphone (multi-language) database