SEAME: a Mandarin-English Code-switching Speech Corpus in South-East Asia

In Singapore and Malaysia, people often speak a mixture of Mandarin and English within a single sentence. We call such sentences intra-sentential code-switch sentences. In this paper, we report on the development of a Mandarin-English code-switching spontaneous speech corpus: SEAME. The corpus is developed as part of a multilingual speech recognition project and will be used to examine how Mandarin-English code-switch speech occurs in the spoken language in South-East Asia. Additionally, it can provide insights into the development of large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) for code-switching speech. The corpus collected consists of intra-sentential code-switching utterances that are recorded under both interview and conversational settings. This paper describes the corpus design and the analysis of collected corpus.