INTO_CASS_HEFEI: A Speech Corpus for Intonation and Prosody Study of Hefei Chinese

There are numerous dialects within Chinese languages, among which Mandarin is the most widely used and geographically distributed dialect. As a branch of Jianghuai Mandarin, Hefei Chinese serves as a transitional area between the Northern Mandarin dialects and Wu Chinese. It holds great significance to conduct research on the tone, intonation, and prosody of Hefei Chinese from a typological perspective. Based on the framework of the Intonation and Prosody Corpus for Chinese Dialects and Ethnic Languages (INTO-CASS), the current study builds the Intonation and Prosody Corpus of Hefei Chinese (INTO_CASS_HEFEI). The corpus comprises a total of 28 speakers from three age groups: senior, middle-aged, and young. The materials include words, sentences, monologues, and dialogues. Each speaker contributed 903 audio files, resulting in a total of 54,315 audio files in the corpus. This paper primarily introduces the background, the materials, the recording procedure, and the data segmentation and annotation of the corpus.