The proposed work creates human language resources to stimulate research in three important areas: (a) automatic language identification-- the problem of identifying the language being spoken; (b) robust speech recognition-- the problem of recognizing speech from different microphones, communication channels, and environmental conditions; and (c) speaker recognition-- the problem of identifying a speaker based on his or her voice characteristics. To support research in automatic language identification, over two minutes of speech from 300 speakers in each of twenty two language is being collected. To support research in robust recognition, about two minutes of cellular speech from several thousand speakers is being collected. To support research in speaker recognition, twelve hundred speakers are providing speech samples during ten telephone calls over a two year period. For each corpus, the speech is annotated orthographically, and a portion of each corpus is transcribed phonetically. A critical need for annotated speech corpora is met by this work: to stimulate research in three important areas of human language technology, leading to secure access to the information highway by any person who speaks a language.
