A Mandarin-English Code-Switching Corpus

Generally the existing monolingual corpora are not suitable for large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) of code-switching speech. The motivation of this paper is to study the rules and constraints code-switching follows and design a corpus for code-switching LVCSR task. This paper presents the development of a Mandarin-English code-switching corpus. This corpus consists of four parts: 1) conversational meeting speech and its data; 2) project meeting speech data; 3) student interviews speech; 4) text data of on-line news. The speech was transcribed by an annotator and verified by Mandarin-English bilingual speakers manually. We propose an approach for automatically downloading from the web text data that contains code-switching. The corpus includes both intra-sentential code-switching (switch in the middle of a sentence) and inter-sentential code-switching (switch at the end of the sentence). The distribution of part-of-speech (POS) tags and code-switching reasons are reported.