Arabic CTS Levantine Fisher Training Data Set 3, Transcripts
| Item Name: | Arabic CTS Levantine Fisher Training Data Set 3, Transcripts |
| Author(s): | Mohamed Maamouri, Tim Buckwalter, Hubert Jin |
| LDC Catalog No.: | LDC2005T03 |
| ISBN: | 1-58563-326-7 |
| ISLRN: | 528-410-099-660-3 |
| Release Date: | January 15, 2005 |
| Member Year(s): | 2005 |
| DCMI Type(s): | Text |
| Project(s): | GALE, EARS |
| Language(s): | North Levantine Arabic, South Levantine Arabic |
| Language ID(s): | apc, ajp |
| License(s): |
LDC User Agreement for Non-Members |
| Online Documentation: | LDC2005T03 Documents |
| Licensing Instructions: | Subscription & Standard Members, and Non-Members |
| Citation: | Maamouri, Mohamed, Tim Buckwalter, and Hubert Jin. Arabic CTS Levantine Fisher Training Data Set 3, Transcripts LDC2005T03. Web Download. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, 2005. |
Introduction
Arabic CTS Levantine Fisher Training Data Set 3 Transcripts provides the transcription for the speech contained in Arabic CTS Levantine Fisher Training Data Set 3, Transcripts (LDC2005S07).
This training speech release consists of 322 conversations, representing a total of approximately 50 hours of Levantine Arabic speech.
The Fisher telephone conversation collection protocol was created at LDC to address a critical need of developers trying to build robust automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Previous collection protocols, such as CALLFRIEND and Switchboard-II and the resulting corpora, have been adapted for ASR research but were in fact developed for language and speaker identification respectively. Although the CALLHOME protocol and corpora were developed to support ASR technology, they feature small numbers of speakers making telephone calls of relatively long duration with narrow vocabulary across the collection. CALLHOME conversations are challengingly natural and intimate. Under the Fisher protocol, a very large number of participants each make a few calls of short duration speaking to other participants, whom they typically do not know, about assigned topics. This maximizes inter-speaker variation and vocabulary breadth although it also increases formality.
Previous protocols such as CALLHOME, CALLFRIEND and Switchboard relied upon participant activity to drive the collection. Fisher is unique in being platform driven rather than participant driven. Participants who wish to initiate a call may do so; however the collection platform initiates the majority of calls. Participants need only answer their phones at the times they specified when registering for the study.
To encourage a broad range of vocabulary, Fisher participants are asked to speak on an assigned topic which is selected at random from a list, which changes every 24 hours and which is assigned to all subjects paired on that day. Some topics are inherited or refined from previous Switchboard studies while others were developed specifically for the Fisher protocol.