---
license: cc-by-nc-4.0
language:
- yue
pretty_name: SBS Cantonese Speech Corpus
size_categories:
- 100K<n<1M
---
# SBS Cantonese Speech Corpus

This speech corpus contains **435 hours** of [SBS Cantonese](https://www.sbs.com.au/language/chinese/zh-hant/podcast/sbs-cantonese) podcasts from Auguest 2022 to October 2023.
There are **2,519 episodes** and each episode is split into segments that are at most 10 seconds long. In total, there are **189,216 segments** in this corpus.
Here is a breakdown on the categories of episodes present in this dataset:

<style>
table th:first-of-type {
    width: 5%;
}
table th:nth-of-type(2) {
    width: 15%;
}
table th:nth-of-type(3) {
    width: 50%;
}
</style>

| Category          | SBS Channels         | Episodes |
|-------------------|----------------------|-------|
| news              | 中文新聞, 新聞簡報    | 622   |
| business          | 寰宇金融            | 148   |
| vaccine           | 疫苗快報            | 71    |
| gardening         | 園藝趣談            | 58    |
| tech              | 科技世界            | 56    |
| health            | 健康快樂人          | 53    |
| culture           | 文化360            | 49    |
| english           | 學英語              | 41    |
| expert            | 專家話你知          | 37    |
| interview         | 我不是名人          | 20    |
| career            | 澳洲招職            | 18    |
| food              | 美食速遞            | 18    |
| uncategorized     | n/a                | 1328  |


* Uncategorized episodes are mostly news but also contains other categories listed above.

## Dataset Details

### Dataset Description

<!-- Provide a longer summary of what this dataset is. -->

- **Curated by:** Kevin Li
- **Language(s):** Cantonese, English (only in podcasts categorized as "english") 
- **License:** Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0

### Scraper

<!-- Provide the basic links for the dataset. -->

- **Repository:** https://github.com/AlienKevin/sbs_cantonese

## Uses

Each episode is split into segments using [silero-vad](https://github.com/snakers4/silero-vad).
Since silero-vad is not trained on Cantonese data, the segmentation is not ideal and often break sentences in the middle.
Hence, this dataset is not intended to be used for supervised ASR. Instead, it is intended to be used for self-supervised
speech pretraining, like training WavLM, HuBERT, and Wav2Vec.

### Format
Each segment is stored as a monochannel FLAC file with a sample rate of 16k Hz. You can find the segments under the `audio/` folder,
where groups of segments are bundled into a .tar.gz file for ease of distribution.

The filename of the segment shows which episodes it belongs to and place of it within that episode:
For example, here's a filename:
```
0061gy0w8_0000_5664_81376
```
where
* `0061gy0w8` is the episode id
* `0000` means that it is the first segment of that episode
* `5664` is the starting sample of this segment. Remember all episodes are sampled at 16k Hz, so the total number of samples
  in an episode is (the duration in seconds * 16,000).
* `81376` is the ending (exclusive) sample of this segment.

### Metadata

Metadata for each episode is stored in the `metadata.jsonl` file, where each line stores the metadata for one episode:
Here's the metadata for one of the episodes (split into multiple lines for clarity):

```json
{
  "title": "SBS 中文新聞 （7月5日）",
  "date": "05/07/2023",
  "view_more_link": "https://www.sbs.com.au/language/chinese/zh-hant/podcast-episode/chinese-news-5-7-2023/tl6s68rdk",
  "download_link": "https://sbs-podcast.streamguys1.com/sbs-cantonese/20230705105920-cantonese-0288b7c2-cb6d-4e0e-aec2-2680dd8738e0.mp3?awCollectionId=sbs-cantonese&awGenre=News&awEpisodeId=20230705105920-cantonese-0288b7c2-cb6d-4e0e-aec2-2680dd8738e0"
}
```
where
* `title` is the title of the episode
* `date` is the date when the episode is published
* `view_more_link` is a link to the associated article/description for this episode.
  Many news episodes have extremely detailed manuscripts written in Traditional Chinese while others have briefer summaries or key points available.
* `download_link` is the link to download the audio for this episode. It is usually hosted on [streamguys](https://www.streamguys.com/) but some earlier episodes
  are stored SBS's own server at https://images.sbs.com.au.

The id of each episode appears at the end of its `view_more_link`. It appears to be a precomputed hash that is unique to each episode.
```python
id = view_more_link.split("/")[-1]
```