NameDat: A database of English proper names spoken by native Norwegians

This paper describes the design and collection of NameDat, a database containing English proper names spoken by native Norwegians. The database was designed to cover the typical acoustic and phonetic variations that appear when Norwegians pronounce English names. The intended use of the database is acoustic and lexical modeling of these phonetic variations. The English names in the database have been enriched with several annotation tiers. The recorded names were selected according to three selection criteria: the familiarity of the name, the expected recognition performance and the coverage of non-native phonemes. The validity of the manual annotations was verified by means of an automatic recognition experiment of non-native names. The experiment showed that the use of the manual transcriptions from NameDat yields an increase in recognition performance over automatically generated transcriptions. 1