RT-03 MDE Training Data Speech
| Item Name: | RT-03 MDE Training Data Speech |
| Author(s): | Stephanie Strassel, Christopher Walker, Haejoong Lee |
| LDC Catalog No.: | LDC2004S08 |
| ISBN: | 1-58563-300-3 |
| ISLRN: | 111-911-583-428-2 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.35111/2jrd-8f06 |
| Release Date: | June 15, 2004 |
| Member Year(s): | 2004 |
| DCMI Type(s): | Sound |
| Sample Type: | u-law, pcm |
| Data Source(s): | broadcast news, telephone speech |
| Project(s): | EARS, GALE |
| Language(s): | English |
| Language ID(s): | eng |
| License(s): |
LDC User Agreement for Non-Members |
| Online Documentation: | LDC2004S08 Documents |
| Licensing Instructions: | Subscription & Standard Members, and Non-Members |
| Citation: | Strassel, Stephanie, Christopher Walker, and Haejoong Lee. RT-03 MDE Training Data Speech LDC2004S08. Web Download. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, 2004. |
| Related Works: | View |
Introduction
MDE RT-03 Training Data Speech corpus was produced by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and contains approximately 70 hours of English Conversational Telephone Speech (CTS) and Broadcast News (BN) audio data.
This data was originally created to support the DARPA EARS (Efficient, Affordable, Reusable Speech-to-Text) Program in Metadata Extraction (MDE) and was distributed as training data for the RT-03F evaluation cycle. The goal of EARS MDE is to enable technology that can take raw Speech-to-Text output and refine it into forms that are of more use to humans and to downstream automatic processes.
The corresponding transcripts and annotations for these speech files are available as MDE RT-03 Training Data Text and Annotations (LDC2004T12).
Data
There are 633 files, totalling approximately 5.39 GB (uncompressed). There are 23 hours of BN and over 46 hours of CTS contained in the corpus.
The CTS data was drawn from Switchboard-1 Release 2 (LDC97S62).
The BN speech data was drawn from 1997 English Broadcast News Speech (HUB4) (LDC98S71), from four distinct sources:
| American Broadcasting Company | (ABC) | (1998, 2001) |
| National Broadcasting Company | (NBC) | (1998, 2001) |
| Public Radio International | (PRI) | (1998) |
| Cable News Network | (CNN) | (2001) |
The audio data in this corpus conforms to the following technical specifications:
| Type | Format | Encoding | Channels | Sample Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CTS | WAVE | u-Law | 2 | 8000/sec |
| BN | WAVE | 16-bit PCM | 1 | 16000/sec |
Note that the data is in wave format. This is the audio file format that our MDE annotation tool supports. Since the annotation data is best explored with this open-source annotation tool, the WAVE format is our choice of data format.
The transcripts corresponding to this speech have been annotated for various kinds of metadata. The goal of MDE is to create automatic transcripts that are maximally readable. To this end, LDC has defined a SimpleMDE annotation task. Under SimpleMDE, annotators identify four types of fillers: filled pauses like "uh" and "um," discourse markers like "you know," asides and parentheticals, and editing terms like "sorry" and "I mean." Edit disfluencies are also identified; the full extent of the disfluency (or string of adjacent disfluencies) and interruption points are tagged.
Annotators further identify SUs (alternately semantic units, sense units, syntactic units, slash units, or sentence units); that is, units within the discourse that function to express a complete thought or idea on the part of a speaker. As with disfluency annotation, the goal of SU labeling is to improve transcript readability, here by creating a transcript in which information is presented in small, structured, coherent chunks rather than long turns or stories. There are four types of sentence-level SUs: statements, questions, backchannels, and incomplete SUs. To enhance inter-annotator consistency, the annotation task also identifies a number of sub-sentence SU boundaries (coordination and clausal SUs).
General information about the EARS MDE Annotation effort can be found at LDC's past projects page.
Samples
Updates
There are no updates available at this time.
Portions (c) 1998 American Broadcasting Company, Inc., (c) 1997-98 Cable News Network, Inc., (c) 1997 Public Radio International, (c) 1997 National Cable Satellite Corporation, (c) 2004 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania