The ‘West Yorkshire Regional English Database’: Investigations into the Generalizability of Reference Populations for Forensic Speaker Comparison Casework
Erica Gold, Sula Ross and Kate Earnshaw
Abstract:
The West Yorkshire Regional English Database (WYRED) consists of approximately 196 hours of high-quality audio recordings of 180 West Yorkshire (British English) speakers. All participants are male between the ages of 18-30 and are divided evenly (60 per region) across three boroughs within West Yorkshire (Northern England): Bradford, Kirklees and Wakefield. Speakers participated in four spontaneous speaking tasks. The first two tasks relate to a mock crime where the participant speaks to a police officer (Research Assistant 1) followed by an accomplice (Research Assistant 2). Speakers returned a minimum of a week later at which point they were paired with someone from their borough and recorded having a conversation on any topics they wish. The final task is an experimental task in which speakers are asked to leave a voicemail message related to the fictitious crime from the first recording session. In total, each speaker participated in approximately 1 hour of spontaneous speech recordings. This paper details the design of WYRED, in order to introduce forensic speech science research utilizing this data and to promote WYRED’s potential application in related research and in forensic speech science casework.
Cite as: Gold, E., Ross, S., Earnshaw, K. (2018) The ‘West Yorkshire Regional English Database’: Investigations into the Generalizability of Reference Populations for Forensic Speaker Comparison Casework. Proc. Interspeech 2018, 2748-2752, DOI: 10.21437/Interspeech.2018-65.
BiBTeX Entry:
@inproceedings{Gold2018,
author={Erica Gold and Sula Ross and Kate Earnshaw},
title={The ‘West Yorkshire Regional English Database’: Investigations into the Generalizability of Reference Populations for Forensic Speaker Comparison Casework},
year=2018,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2018},
pages={2748--2752},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2018-65},
url={http://dx.doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2018-65} }