Development of a Large Spontaneous Speech Database of Agglutinative Hungarian Language

In this paper, a large Hungarian spoken language database is introduced. This phonetically-based multi-purpose database contains various types of spontaneous and read speech from 333 monolingual speakers (about 50 minutes of speech sample per speaker). This study presents the background and motivation of the development of the BEA Hungarian database, describes its protocol and the transcription procedure, and also presents existing and proposed research using this database. Due to its recording protocol and the transcription it provides a challenging material for various comparisons of segmental structures of speech also across languages.