VOLIP: A corpus of spoken Italian and a virtuous example of reuse of linguistic resources

The corpus VoLIP (The Voice of LIP) is an Italian speech resource which associates the audio signals to the orthographic transcriptions of the LIP Corpus. The LIP Corpus was designed to represent diaphasic, diatopic and diamesic variation. The Corpus was collected in the early '90s to compile a frequency lexicon of spoken Italian and its size was tailored to produce a reliable frequency lexicon for the first 3,000 lemmas. Therefore, it consists of about 500,000 word tokens for 60 hours of recording. The speech materials belong to five different text registers and they were collected in four different cities. Thanks to a modern technological approach VoLIP web service allows users to search the LIP corpus using IMDI metadata, lexical or morpho-syntactic entry keys, receiving as result the audio portions aligned to the corresponding required entry. The VoLIP corpus is freely available at the URL http://www.parlaritaliano.it.