Development of new speech corpus for elderly Japanese speech recognition

We have constructed a new speech data corpus, using the utterances of 100 elderly Japanese people, to improve speech recognition accuracy of the speech of older people. Humanoid robots are being developed for use in elder care nursing homes. Interaction with such robots is expected to help maintain the cognitive abilities of nursing home residents, as well as providing them with companionship. In order for these robots to interact with elderly people through spoken dialogue, a high performance speech recognition system for speech of elderly people is needed. To develop such a system, we recorded speech uttered by 100 elderly Japanese, most of them are living in nursing homes, with an average age of 77.2. Previously, a seniors' speech corpus named S-JNAS was developed, but the average age of the participants was 67.6 years, but the target age for nursing home care is around 75 years old, much higher than that of the SJNAS samples. In this paper we compare our new corpus with an existing Japanese read speech corpus, JNAS, which consists of adult speech, and with the above mentioned S-JNAS, the senior version of JNAS.