Development of an English Accent Database for Speech Analysis and Recognition

Habibu Rabiu, Djagbe Sirbele

Abstract


The multi ethnic nature of Nigeria and its strong attachments to values and traditions makes it unique among other African nations. The three main ethnic groups namely, Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba can in most cases be distinguished in terms of the attires they use and the style of their dressing or more generally by their physique. Nonetheless, socialization and intermarriages are making these factors fast disappearing. Yet, another physiological characteristic of humans is found in their sound production which contains interesting features that can be used to classify individual ethnicity. However, lack of locally developed audio database has hindered research progress in this area, unlike in other cultures were marked language database is in abundance. This research is focus on developing multi ethnic-based audio database that could be used for research in the areas of speech analysis, voice recognition and automatic answering machine system among others. The developed database contained 12,960 short documented words recorded from 72 participants drawn across the three major ethic groups namely Hausa, Ibo and Yoruba. The recordings were done in ultra-modern oral documentation studio using Audacity recording software (v 2.3.2).


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