Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals ( Bas ) Status Report 1995 - 2000

Outline of this Report The Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals (BAS) is a joint initiative of the Bavarian State and the Ludwig Maximilians Universität München. It is located at the host organisation Institut für Phonetik und Sprachliche Kommunikation and collects, evaluates, produces and disseminates speech based resources to the scientific community. Our focus is the German language covering a large geographical part of central Europe. This report covers BAS related activities in the period of Jan 1995 to Feb 2000. The report is organised as follows. The first part after the general introduction deals with our experiences during the last five years to produce new, highly re-usable speech resources in close cooperation with industrial partners. We will explain our BAS policies that ensure that valuable resources do not only satisfy short-term needs of certain industrial applications but are useful for other research or engineering activities as well. Some example projects will highlight these points. The second part lists projects and/or cooperations that have been conducted or started during 1995 to 2000. Furthermore, associated projects where BAS is not directly funded but agreed to act as a focal point or distribution/evaluation center are given here. The third section gives an overview about the administration and dissemination methods currently used by BAS. We also will give numbers about how many resources were distributed in the reporting period to how many users as well as details about our cooperation with the European Language Resources Association (ELRA). Section 4 gives a brief overview of some special scientific multi-modal data collected at BAS, while the final section 5 is reserved for minor BAS activities and contacts. In appendix A you will find a concise description of all German speech and speech-related resources that are currently available at BAS, while in appendix B you will find a brief description of the annotation tool WWWTranscribe developed and distributed by BAS.