CACrown ArchivesThe cinema collection
EN/FR
Search
Menu
Research dossier · General Reference

Switchboard Telephone Speech Corpus

corpus of spoken English language

Cross-disciplinary reference desk with index cards, atlas, dictionary and catalogue
General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 3, 2026
Entity authorityQ124504781 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Switchboard Telephone Speech Corpus is a corpus of spoken English language consisting of almost 260 hours of speech. It was created in 1990 by Texas Instruments via a DARPA grant, and released in 1992 by NIST. The corpus contains 2,400 telephone conversations among 543 US speakers (302 male, 241 female). Participants did not know each other, and conversations were held on topics from a predetermined list.

Switchboard-2 Phase II was collected in 1999 and includes "4,472 five-minute telephone conversations involving 679 participants".

The corpus was used for development of speech recognition algorithms.

Text example:

Further reading

Calhoun, Sasha; Carletta, Jean; Brenier, Jason M.; Mayo, Neil; Jurafsky, Dan; Steedman, Mark; Beaver, David (December 2010). "The NXT-format Switchboard Corpus: a rich resource for investigating the syntax, semantics, pragmatics and prosody of dialogue" (PDF). Language Resources and Evaluation. 44 (4): 387–419. doi:10.1007/s10579-010-9120-1.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Switchboard Telephone Speech Corpus” is corpus of spoken English language. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Switchboard, Telephone and Speech, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1990, 1992, 1999, 2010—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1990. For this dossier, Switchboard, Telephone and Speech is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “corpus of spoken English language” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q124504781. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1990, 1992, 1999 and 2010.

Critical limits

A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
Verify next

The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Switchboard Telephone Speech Corpus”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Switchboard Telephone Speech Corpus primary sources, Switchboard Telephone Speech Corpus archive and Switchboard research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Switchboard Telephone Speech Corpus”?
  2. Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
  3. What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
Subject index

Search terms from this dossier

Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Switchboard Telephone Speech Corpus” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.