computer science

TIMIT

TIMIT is a computer science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand TIMIT rather than just read about it. In short: TIMIT is a corpus of phonemically and lexically transcribed speech of American English speakers of different sexes and dialects. Each transcribed element has been delineated in time.

Key takeaways

TIMIT belongs to computer science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect TIMIT to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of TIMIT from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

TIMIT is a corpus of phonemically and lexically transcribed speech of American English speakers of different sexes and dialects. Each transcribed element has been delineated in time. TIMIT was designed to further acoustic-phonetic knowledge and automatic speech recognition systems. It was commissioned by DARPA and corpus design was a joint effort between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, SRI International, and Texas Instruments (TI). The speech was recorded at TI, transcribed at MIT, and verified and prepared for publishing by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). There is also a telephone bandwidth version called NTIMIT (Network TIMIT). TIMIT and NTIMIT are not freely available — either membership of the Linguistic Data Consortium, or a monetary payment, is required for access to the dataset.

Data TIMIT contains ~5 hours of speech, of 10 sentences spoken by each of 630 speakers. The sentences were randomly sampled from a corpus of 2342 sentences. The speakers were native speakers of American English, classified under 8 major dialect regions: New England, Northern, North Midland, South Midland, Southern, New York City, Western, Army Brat (moved around). The speakers were 70% male and 30% female. Recordings were made in a noise-isolated recording booth at Texas Instruments, using a semi-automatic computer system (STEROIDS) to control the presentation of prompts to the speaker and the recording. Two-channel recordings were made using a Sennheiser HMD 414 headset-mounted microphone and a Brüel & Kjær 1/2" far-field pressure microphone (#4165). The speech was digitized at a sample rate of 20 kHz then and downsampled to 16 kHz.

History The TIMIT telephone corpus was an early attempt to create a database with speech samples. It was published in the year 1988 on CD-ROM and consists of only 10 sentences per speaker. Two 'dialect' sentences were read by each speaker, as well as another 8 sentences selected from a larger set Each sentence averages 3 seconds long and is spoken by 630 different speakers. It was the first notable attempt in creating and distributing a speech corpus and the overall project has produced costs of 1.5 million US$. An update was released in October 1990. It included

full 630-speaker corpus; checked and corrected transcriptions; word-alignment transcriptions; NIST SPHERE-headered waveform files and header manipulation software; phonemic dictionary; new test and training subsets balanced for dialectal and phonetic coverage; more extensive documentation. The full name of the project is DARPA-TIMIT Acoustic-Phonetic Continuous Speech Corpus and the acronym TIMIT stands for Texas Instruments/Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The main reason why a corpus of telephone speech was created was to train speech recognition software. In the Blizzard challenge, different software has the obligation to convert audio recordings into textual data and the TIMIT corpus was used as a standardized baseline.

See also Comparison of datasets in machine learning

References

External links TIMIT Acoustic-Phonetic Continuous Speech Corpus

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with TIMIT

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what TIMIT claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In computer science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to TIMIT before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about TIMIT ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of TIMIT

In research: TIMIT appears in computer science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses TIMIT in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: TIMIT is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Applied linguistics, Computational linguistics, Corpus linguistics stubs, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for TIMIT outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study TIMIT in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what TIMIT means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain TIMIT out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is TIMIT in simple terms?

TIMIT is a corpus of phonemically and lexically transcribed speech of American English speakers of different sexes and dialects. Each transcribed element has been delineated in time.

Why does TIMIT matter?

Because it connects several computer science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study TIMIT?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on TIMIT.