Swiss Parliaments Corpus, an Automatically Aligned Swiss German Speech to Standard German Text Corpus.

We present a forced sentence alignment procedure for Swiss German speech and Standard German text. It is able to create a speech-to-text corpus in a fully automatic fashion, given an audio recording and the corresponding unaligned transcript. Compared to a manual alignment, it achieves a mean IoU of 0.8401 with a sentence recall of 0.9491. When applying our IoU estimate filter, the mean IoU can be further improved to 0.9271 at the cost of a lower sentence recall of 0.4881. Using this procedure, we created the Swiss Parliaments Corpus, an automatically aligned Swiss German speech to Standard German text corpus. 65 % of the raw data could be transformed to sentence-level audio-text-pairs, resulting in 293 hours of training data. We have made the corpus freely available for download.