ICSI Meeting Speech

Introduction

ICSI Meeting Speech was produced by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and contains approximately 72 hours of English meeting speech.

The ICSI Meeting corpus is a collection of 75 meetings collected at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) in Berkeley during the years 2000-2002. The meetings included are "natural" meetings in the sense that they would have occurred anyway: they are generally regular weekly meetings of various ICSI working teams, including the team working on the ICSI Meeting Project. In recording meetings of this type, we hoped to capture meeting dynamics and speaking styles that are as natural as possible given that speakers are wearing close-talking microphones and are fully cognizant of the recording process. The speech files range in length from 17 to 103 minutes, but generally run just under an hour each. Word-level orthographic transcriptions are available as ICSI Meeting Transcripts (LDC2004T04).

Data

The collection includes 922 files, totaling 883 hours of audio representing 72 hours of speech. The speech is structured as one subdirectory per meeting, containing wave files for each channel (and possibly .blp files, specifying any censored intervals).

The meetings were simultaneously recorded using close-talking microphones for each speaker (generally head-mounted, but early meetings contain some lapel microphones), as well as six table-top microphones: four high-quality omnidirectional PZM microphones arrayed down the center of the conference table, and two inexpensive microphone elements mounted on a mock PDA. All meetings were recorded in the same instrumented meeting room.

The audio was collected at a 48 kHz sample rate, downsampled on the fly to 16 kHz. Audio files for each meeting are provided as separate time-synchronous recordings for each channel, encoded as 16-bit linear (big-endian) wave files, shorten-compressed in NIST SPHERE format.

In addition to recording the meetings themselves, the participants were also asked to read digit strings, similar to those found in TIDIGITS, at the start or end of the meeting. This small-vocabulary read-speech component of the recordings -- using the same meeting room, speakers, and microphones -- provides a valuable supplement to the natural conversational data, allowing a factorization of the speech challenges offered by the corpus. For all but a dozen of the meetings included in the corpus, at least some of the participants read digit strings; for the great majority of meetings, all participants did. The digit readings are included as part of the wave files for the meeting as a whole and are fully transcribed as part of the associated transcripts.

There are a total of 53 unique speakers in the corpus (40 male, 13 female). Meetings involved anywhere from three to 10 participants, averaging six. The corpus contains a significant proportion of non-native English speakers, varying in fluency from nearly-native to challenging-to-transcribe.

Samples

Please listen to this audio sample.

Sponsorship

The collection and preparation of this corpus was made possible in large part through funding from DARPA, both through the Communicator project and through a ROAR "seedling," the Swiss IM2 project (National Centre of Competence in Research, sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation), and a supplementary award from IBM.

Updates

There are no updates available at this time. More information is available at http://www.ICSI.Berkeley.EDU/Speech/mr.