FreeCLAS stands for "Free Commons of Linguistically Annotated Speech".

The motivation for FreeCLAS is to build a data base of high-quality speech data. That means annotated data that have been validated by humans. Building such a data base has been expensive because it requires substantial investment of people's attention. As a result, high-quality speech data is not generally available.

This problem is similar to the one that the wikipedia project tackled. This project aims to use the same method, a wiki, to make it possible for people to build FreeCLAS via collaborative contributions over the web. In return, everybody has free and open access to the results.

Although this wiki[1] is in English at this point, the speech data will be multilingual. As a first step, the phonetic annotations will use the International Phonetic Alphabet.

In addition to the data base, this project will also develop the formats and tools needed to build it. One of the tools that we will use is Shva, a graphical editor that opens from your browser to let you hear, view and annotate any utterance in FreeCLAS. To begin, you can use shva to review or edit Monowave80, a small collection of annotated utterances. In the course of improving this seed data base, we hope to improve the current AnnotationTools, annotate more data, and build more tools. That is why all the software here is Free Software.

FreeCLAS is an iheartm project.

How to participate

• as a visitor. You are free to read the wiki pages, download data or software or try out shva.
• as an observer. You can visit, and also make comments. You will need to learn how to write in a wiki page, and observe wiki etiquette. To become an observer, click on "My Prefs", and declare your name. Your comments will be attributed to your name.
• as an user. To become an user, you must register. Click on "Login" below the little icon representing you, then click the "register new user" tab, or the "join FreeCLAS" link. When you login after you have registered, you will see the notation "authenticated" under your login name. Users can edit existing wiki pages and create new wiki pages. You may also request, or be recruited, to become an annotator or software deveoper.
• as an annotator. Annotators can upload files to FreeCLAS. Most importantly, annotators can save the annotations they have edited with shva back to FreeCLAS.
• as a software developer. We are working on the infrastructure to host all the FOSS(Free and Open Source Software) in this project. In the meantime, one basic package, libogg++, is already hosted off-site because of its wider applicability.

[#1] This wiki uses JSPWiki. See http://www.jspwiki.org for more information.