The Sheffield Wargames Corpus.

Recognition of speech in natural environments is a challenging task, even more so if this involves conversations between several speakers. Work on meeting recognition has addressed some of the significant challenges, mostly targeting formal, business style meetings where people are mostly in a static position in a room. Only limited data is available that contains high quality near and far field data from real interactions between participants. In this paper we present a new corpus for research on speech recognition, speaker tracking and diarisation, based on recordings of native speakers of English playing a table-top wargame. The Sheffield Wargames Corpus comprises 7 hours of data from 10 recording sessions, obtained from 96 microphones, 3 video cameras and, most importantly, 3D location data provided by a sensor tracking system. The corpus represents a unique resource, that provides for the first time location tracks (1.3Hz) of speakers that are constantly moving and talking. The corpus is available for research purposes, and includes annotated development and evaluation test sets. Baseline results for close-talking and far field sets are included in this paper.