Puheaineisto

Puheaineisto, or speech material, is a term used in linguistics and language technology to denote a collection of spoken language data. A puheaineisto typically comprises audio recordings and associated annotations, such as transcriptions, phonetic or phonological markings, prosody labels, and metadata describing speakers, contexts, and recording conditions. The data may consist of spontaneous conversation, monologues, read speech, or elicited speech, and may cover one or more languages and dialects.

Puheaineiston content and uses vary, but common elements include audio files, transcripts, and multi-layer annotations. These materials are used for linguistic analysis (phonetics, phonology, sociolinguistics), as well as for developing and evaluating speech technology such as automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), and language identification, as well as broader natural language processing tasks. Puheaineisto may be monolingual or multilingual and can focus on specific genres, dialects, ages, or social groups.

Creation and management: Puheaineisto is collected through fieldwork, laboratory recordings, or digitization of existing recordings. Ethical and legal considerations include informed consent, privacy protection, licensing terms, and redistribution rights. Access policies vary: some corpora are openly available, others require data-sharing agreements or institutional authorization. Data are often annotated using standard formats and tools (for example TEI, ELAN, Praat conventions) and linked to comprehensive metadata about speakers and context.

In Finland, puheaineisto is commonly archived in Kielipankki, the Language Bank of Finland, and other national or university repositories. The existence and accessibility of puheaineisto support reproducible research, cross-linguistic studies, and the development of language technologies. See also: Speech corpus, Corpus linguistics, Kielipankki.