Chinese TIMIT: A TIMIT-like corpus of standard Chinese

This paper describes an effort to build a TIMIT-like corpus in Standard Chinese, which is part of our "Global TIMIT" project. Three steps are involved and detailed in the paper: selection of sentences; speaker recruitment and recording; and phonetic segmentation. The corpus consists of 6000 sentences read by 50 speakers (25 females and 25 males). Phonetic segmentation obtained from forced alignment is provided, which has 93.2% agreement (of phone boundaries) within 20 ms compared to manual segmentation on 50 randomly selected sentences. Statistics on the number of tokens and mean duration of phones and tones in the corpus are also reported. Males have shorter phones/tones but more and longer utterance internal silences than females, demonstrating that males in this dataset speak faster but pause more frequently and longer.