The C-ORAL-BRASIL I: Reference corpus for informal spoken Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

The C-ORAL-BRASIL is a Brazilian Portuguese spontaneous speech corpus, representative of the state of Minas Gerais diatopy (primarily from the capital city, Belo Horizonte,metropolitan area). The corpus was compiled following the same architecture and segmentation criteria adopted by the C-ORAL-ROM [1] as well as its alignment software, the WinPitch [2]. The corpus comprises 139 informal speech texts, 208,130 words, 21:08:52 hours of recording (6.1 GB wav files). The mean word number per text is 1,500. The recordings were carried out with high resolution, non-invasive wireless equipment, generally with clip-on, monodirectional microphones, and a mixer whenever there were more than two interactants, in a few occasions omnidirectional microphones were used. The texts are transcribed following the CHAT format [3], implemented for prosodic annotation [4]. The main goals for the corpus architecture are the documentation of the diaphasic and diastratic variations in Brazilian Portuguese speech. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.