Research Methodologies, Observations and Outcomes in (Conversational) Speech Data Collection

This paper presents research methodologies for collecting speech data and gives observations from a recent set of conversational speech collections before describing their outcomes. The presentation begins with a comparison of the relative challenges offered by broadcast news, telephone conversation and meeting recordings. The remainder of the discussion focuses on methods for collection of conversational data with special focus on two recent Switchboard collections. We identify method that have allowed for very cost-efficient collection of Switchboard data. We conclude with a summary of generally available resources that result from the efforts described herein.