  Maltese, the national language of Malta, is spoken by approximately 500,000
people. Speech processing for Maltese is still in its early stages of
development. In this paper, we present the first spoken Maltese corpus designed
purposely for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). The MASRI-HEADSET corpus was
developed by the MASRI project at the University of Malta. It consists of 8
hours of speech paired with text, recorded by using short text snippets in a
laboratory environment. The speakers were recruited from different geographical
locations all over the Maltese islands, and were roughly evenly distributed by
gender. This paper also presents some initial results achieved in baseline
experiments for Maltese ASR using Sphinx and Kaldi. The MASRI-HEADSET Corpus is
publicly available for research/academic purposes.
