# Merkel Podcast Corpus: A Multimodal Dataset Compiled from 16 Years of Angela Merkel's Weekly Video Podcasts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.12194 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12194/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Natural TTS Synthesis by Conditioning WaveNet on Mel Spectrogram Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05884/) (2017)
- [A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10010/) (2020)
- [LRS3-TED: a large-scale dataset for visual speech recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00496/) (2018)
- [Lip Reading Sentences in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05358/) (2016)
- [S3FD: Single Shot Scale-invariant Face Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05237/) (2017)
- [ObamaNet: Photo-realistic lip-sync from text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01442/) (2017)
- [Neural Dubber: Dubbing for Videos According to Scripts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08243/) (2021)
- [VisualTTS: TTS with Accurate Lip-Speech Synchronization for Automatic Voice Over](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03342/) (2021)
- [More than Words: In-the-Wild Visually-Driven Prosody for Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10139/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce the Merkel Podcast Corpus, an audio-visual-text corpus in German collected from 16 years of (almost) weekly Internet podcasts of former German chancellor Angela Merkel. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first single speaker corpus in the German language consisting of audio, visual and text modalities of comparable size and temporal extent. We describe the methods used with which we have collected and edited the data which involves downloading the videos, transcripts and other metadata, forced alignment, performing active speaker recognition and face detection to finally curate the single speaker dataset consisting of utterances spoken by Angela Merkel. The proposed pipeline is general and can be used to curate other datasets of similar nature, such as talk show contents. Through various statistical analyses and applications of the dataset in talking face generation and TTS, we show the utility of the dataset. We argue that it is a valuable contribution to the research community, in particular, due to its realistic and challenging material at the boundary between prepared and spontaneous speech.