TDT4 Multilingual Broadcast News Speech Corpus
| Item Name: | TDT4 Multilingual Broadcast News Speech Corpus |
| Author(s): | Junbo Kong, David Graff |
| LDC Catalog No.: | LDC2005S11 |
| ISBN: | 1-58563-338-0 |
| ISLRN: | 381-876-213-869-8 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.35111/90ef-0a97 |
| Release Date: | May 15, 2005 |
| Member Year(s): | 2005 |
| DCMI Type(s): | Sound |
| Sample Type: | 2-channel |
| Sample Rate: | 16000 |
| Data Source(s): | broadcast news |
| Project(s): | GALE, TDT, TIDES |
| Language(s): | English, Standard Arabic, Mandarin Chinese |
| Language ID(s): | eng, arb, cmn |
| License(s): |
LDC User Agreement for Non-Members |
| Online Documentation: | LDC2005S11 Documents |
| Licensing Instructions: | Subscription & Standard Members, and Non-Members |
| Citation: | Kong, Junbo, and David Graff. TDT4 Multilingual Broadcast News Speech Corpus LDC2005S11. Web Download. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, 2005. |
| Related Works: | View |
Introduction
TDT4 Multilingual Broadcast News Speech Corpus was developed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) with support from the DARPA TIDES (Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization) Program. This release contains the complete set of American English, Modern Standard Arabic, and Mandarin Chinese broadcast news audio used in the 2002 and 2003 Topic Detection and Tracking (TDT) technology evaluations, totalling approximately 607 hours.
The corresponding transcripts for these speech files are available in TDT4 Multilingual Text and Annotations (LDC2005T16). That release also includes newswire data and topic relevance annotations.
TDT refers to automatic techniques for finding topically related material in streams of data such as newswire and broadcast news. Evaluation tasks in 2002 and 2003 included the segmentation of a news source into stories, the tracking of known topics, the detection of unknown topics, the detection of initial stories on unknown topics, and the detection of pairs of stories on the same topic.
Data
The TDT4 corpus contains news data collected daily from 20 news sources (13 broadcast, seven newswire) in three languages (American English, Mandarin Chinese, and Modern Standard Arabic), over a period of four months (October 2000 through January 2001). Here's a breakdown of the broadcast data included in this release with number of files and time length by source:
| Language | Source | Program | Files | Hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arabic | Voice of America | Modern Standard Arabic news programs | 68 | 67.9 |
| Nile TV | 41 | 20.4 | ||
| Language Totals | 109 | 88.3 | ||
| English | Cable News Network | Headline News | 129 | 64.5 |
| American Broadcasting Company | World News Tonight | 77 | 38.5 | |
| National Broadcasting Company | NBC Nightly News Tonight | 70 | 35 | |
| Public Radio International | The World | 62 | 62 | |
| Voice of America | English news programs | 69 | 68.4 | |
| MS-NBC | News with Brian Williams | 43 | 43 | |
| Language Totals | 450 | 311.3 | ||
| Mandarin | China Broadcasting System | 103 | 33.9 | |
| China Television System | 106 | 42.3 | ||
| Voice of America | Mandarin Chinese news programs | 64 | 63.6 | |
| China National Radio | 86 | 36.6 | ||
| China Central Television | 65 | 31 | ||
| Language Totals | 424 | 207.4 | ||
| Totals | 983 | 607 | ||
The files are presented in NIST SPHERE format, 1-channel, sampled at 16 kHz.
Samples
For an example of the data in this corpus, please listen to these samples:
Updates
The initial July 2005 release contained an error in which a small number of files were misnamed. That error has been corrected. Users who received the original release should have also received the correction. Anyone who ordered this publication before Nov. 1, 2005 and has not received a correction should contact LDC's Membership Office at ldc@ldc.upenn.edu.
Copyright
Portions © 2000-2001: Xinhua News Agency, Agence France-Presse, New York Times, Associated Press Newswire, Zaobao, An-Nahar, Al-Hayat, Nile TV, Voice of America, Public Radio International, Cable News Network, American Broadcasting Corporation, National Broadcasting Company, China National Radio, China Television System, China Central TV, China Broadcasting System, © 2000-2001, 2005 Trustees of the University of PennsylvaniaThe World is a co-production of Public Radio International and the British Broadcasting Corporation and is produced at WGBH Boston.