ICSI Meeting Transcripts

Introduction

ICSI Meeting Transcripts was produced by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and contains word-level transcripts for approximately 72 hours of English meeting recordings, totaling about 795,000 words.

The ICSI Meeting corpus is a collection of 75 meetings collected at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley (ICSI) 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.

The corresponding speech files for these transcripts are available in ICSI Meeting Speech (LDC2004S02).

Data

This corpus consists of 75 word-level transcripts (one transcript file per meeting), time-synchronized to digitized audio recordings. There are approximately 795 K-words (thousands of words) and 13K unique words in the transcripts.

The meetings were recorded with close-talking and far-field microphones. The transcripts were based mostly on the close-talking microphones, either separately or blended together in a so-called "mixed" channel. The focus of the transcripts was on capturing the flow of audible events, especially the words which were spoken, and who spoke them.

In addition to recording the meetings themselves, the participants were also asked to read digit strings, similar to those found in TIDIGITS (LDC93S10), 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.

The transcripts are provided in an XML format developed for this corpus, which we call MRT files (for Meeting Room Transcript). The format is detailed in the associated documentation. Transcripts were prepared by means of the Channeltrans interface. Channeltrans is an extension of the Transcriber interface.

There are a total of 53 unique speakers in the corpus. 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 view the following sample: Transcript

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.