Common Voice Scripted Speech 24.0 - Latvian

Latviešu — Latvian (lv)

This datasheet is for version 24.0 of the the Mozilla Common Voice Scripted Speech dataset for Latvian (lv). The dataset contains 230860 clips representing 308.43 hours of recorded speech (264.46 hours validated) from 6530 speakers.

Language

Latvian is an Baltic language belonging to the Indo-European language family. It is spoken in the Baltic region, and is the official language of Latvia as well as one of the official languages of the European Union. There are about 1.5 million native Latvian speakers in Latvia and 100,000 abroad. It uses the Latin alphabet with additional diacritical marks to represent specific sounds.

Variants

There are slight stylistic speach variations among different regions of Latvia, but they do not affect mutual intelligibility. Latgale region has more significant differences with main Latvian language. It is sometimes considered a dialect, but Latgalian (ltg) speech is collected as a separate language in Common Voice.

Demographic information

The dataset includes the following distribution of age and gender.

Gender

Self-declared gender information, percentage refers to the number of clips annotated with this gender.

Age

Self-declared age information, percentage refers to the number of clips annotated with this age band.

Data splits for modelling

The official data splits for modelling this language are as follows. Of the validated clips, 15.17% are included in the splits.

Text corpus

The text corpus contains 99526 sentences, of which 34448 are validated, 65078 are invalidated and 3143 are reported.

Writing system

Latvian alphabet is based on the Latin script and consists of 33 letters, including special characters with diacritical marks such as ā, č, ē, ģ, ī, ķ, ļ, ņ, š, ū, and ž.

Historic texts also used letter /ŗ/, but use of it has been officially discontinued since 1946. This letter is equivalent to letter /r/ in modern Latvian orthography.

Letter /o/ can represent three different sounds [ua̯], [ɔ], [ɔː].

Letter /e/ can represent two different sounds [e], [æ].

Symbol table

a ā b c č d e ē f g ģ h i ī j k ķ l ļ m n ņ o p r s š t u ū v z ž

Sample

There follows a randomly selected sample of five sentences from the corpus.

Uzzinājis par kureliešu atbruņošanu, leitnants Rubenis pavēlēja bataljonam doties pārgājienā.
Mācījās Napoleona Asmusa privātskolā, vēlāk bija māceklis sava tēva koktirdzniecības uzņēmumā.
"Jo manai "sapņu princesei" vajadzētu māju, automašīnu un daudz skaistu tērpu."
Alus brūvēšanu, šņabja sagādi, malkas sagādi lokmobīlei.
Karavīri uzdāvināja frontes paciņu, kurā atradās saldumi un šokolādes tāfelīte.

Sources

Text sources in the dataset consists of user added content as well as balanced sets of samples from Wikipedia, European parliament transcripts, out of copyright books and other sources.

Text domains

Processing

Recommended post-processing

• Filter out clips with /ŗ/

• Filter out clips with characters not in the Latvian alphabet

Fields

Each row of a tsv file represents a single audio clip, and contains the following information:

• client_id - hashed UUID of a given user

• path - relative path of the audio file

• text - supposed transcription of the audio

• up_votes - number of people who said audio matches the text

• down_votes - number of people who said audio does not match text

• age - age of the speaker1

• gender - gender of the speaker1

• accent - accent of the speaker1

• segment - if sentence belongs to a custom dataset segment, it will be listed here

Get involved!

Community links

• Common Voice translators on Pontoon

• Balsu talka

Discussions

Contribute

• Speak

• Write

• Listen

• Review

Acknowledgements

Datasheet authors

Raivis Dejus orvils@gmail.com

Citation guidelines

Funding

Licence

This dataset is released under the Creative Commons Zero (CC-0) licence. By downloading this data you agree to not determine the identity of speakers in the dataset.

Footnotes

1. For a full list of age, gender, and accent options, see the demograpics spec. These will only be reported if the speaker opted in to provide that information. ↩ ↩2 ↩3