Mandarin-English Code-Switching in South-East Asia

LDC2015S04

Introduction

Mandarin-English Code-Switching in South-East Asia, Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) Catalog Number LDC2015S04 and ISBN 1-58563-709-2, was developed by Nanyang Technological University and Universiti Sains Malaysia in Singapore and Malaysia, respectively. It is comprised of approximately 192 hours of Mandarin-English code-switching speech from 156 speakers with associated transcripts.

Code-switching refers to the practice of shifting between languages or language varieties during conversation. This corpus focuses on the shift between Mandarin and English by Malaysian and Singaporean speakers. Speakers engaged in unscripted conversations and interviews. In the conversational speech segments, two speakers conversed freely with each other. The interviews consisted of questions from an interviewer and answers from an interviewee; only the interviewee's speech was recorded. Topics discussed range from hobbies, friends, and daily activities.

Data

The speakers were gender-balanced (49.7% female, 50.3% male) and between 19 and 33 years of age. Over 60% of the speakers were Singaporean; the rest were Malaysian.

The speech recordings were conducted in a quiet room using several microphones and recording devices. Details about the recording conditions are contained in the documentation provided with this release. The audio files in this corpus are 16KHz, 16-bit recordings in flac compressed wav format between 20 and 120 minutes in length.

Selected segments of the audio recordings were transcribed. Most of those segments contain code-switching utterances. The transcription file for each audio file is stored in UTF-8 tab-separated text file format.

Directory Structure

Please see file.tbl for a complete file list as well as checksums for this publication.

Updates

Additional information, updates, bug fixes may be available in the LDC catalog entry for this corpus at LDC2015S04.

Content Copyright

Portions © 2015 Nanyang Technical University, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania