Example

The following example is fictitious and will therefore not contain all possible items to be validated. It should merely give you an idea how a specification for corpus validation might look:

The speech corpus for the following validation example consists of un-supervised telephone recordings by 1000 speakers with the orthographic transcript as annotation.

Quantitative (Formal) Validation Procedure:

Check for 134 recording items per speaker.
Check for empty signal files.
Check for signals files with clippings; must always be less than 5%.
Check for S/N; must be more than 15 dB.
Check for correct terminology for all data files according to specs.
Check for one annotation file per signal file.
Check if annotation files are parsable.
Check for complete and parsable speaker profile per speaker.
Check for complete and parsable recording protocol per recording.
Check for 50/50% gender distribution +/- 5%.
Check for age distribution in two groups 18 - 32 and 32 - 64; both groups have 50% +/- 5%.
Check for parsability and completeness of dictionary.

Qualitative Validation Procedure:

Check documentation for completeness and consistency.
Check 5% randomly selected annotation files by independent manual transliteration and cross check results; 3% word errors (including insertions and deletions) allowed.
Check 10% randomly selected entries from dictionary for correct pronunciation; 2% phonemic errors (including insertions and deletions) are allowed.