The voice as a material clue: a new forensic Algerian Corpus

Dialects have received bigger interest in recent years as they are increasingly used on the web and social media. Because Algerian Arabic dialects suffer from a lack of appropriate speech corpora for speech recognition, a rich dialect corpus is needed to approach Algerian Accent recognition. The latter remains a key feature in the field of Forensic Voice Comparison (FVC) systems. This paper presents a new large-scale forensic Algerian speech corpus called Sawt El-Djazaïr. An important criterion in dealing with forensic corpora is the presence of session variability. For this purpose, we collected celebrity recordings in various regions of Algeria, from different social networks, in various scenarios, and at different times. In addition, we also recorded 87 participants using cellular calls and voice over IP (VoIP) applications including Viber, WhatsApp, and Google Meet. The corpus of approximately 50 hours covers various speech topics and is spoken in twelve Algerian sub-dialects. The design guidelines of the proposed corpus are described along with the grouping of dialects across different geographical locations. Sawt El-Djazaïr is available to the research community upon request.