GALE Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Parallel Text - Part 2
| Item Name: | GALE Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Parallel Text - Part 2 |
| Author(s): | Xiaoyi Ma, Stephanie Strassel |
| LDC Catalog No.: | LDC2009T06 |
| ISBN: | 1-58563-503-0 |
| ISLRN: | 150-170-938-041-0 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.35111/eg8b-hc77 |
| Release Date: | March 17, 2009 |
| Member Year(s): | 2009 |
| DCMI Type(s): | Text |
| Data Source(s): | transcribed speech, broadcast conversation |
| Project(s): | GALE |
| Application(s): | machine translation |
| Language(s): | English, Mandarin Chinese |
| Language ID(s): | eng, cmn |
| License(s): |
LDC User Agreement for Non-Members |
| Online Documentation: | LDC2009T06 Documents |
| Licensing Instructions: | Subscription & Standard Members, and Non-Members |
| Citation: | Ma, Xiaoyi, and Stephanie Strassel. GALE Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Parallel Text - Part 2 LDC2009T06. Web Download. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, 2009. |
| Related Works: | View |
Introduction
GALE Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Parallel Text - Part 2, Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) catalog number LDC2009T06 andISBN 1-58563-503-0, contains transcripts and English translations of 24 hours of Chinese broadcast conversation programming from China Central TV (CCTV), Phoenix TV and Voice of America (VOA). It does not contain the audio files from which the transcripts and translations were generated. This release, along with other corpora, was used as training data in Phase 1 (year 1) of the DARPA-funded GALE program. GALE Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Parallel Text - Part 1 was released in January 2009.
Source Data
A total of 24 hours of Chinese broadcast conversation programming was selected from three sources: CCTV (a broadcaster from Mainland China), Phoenix TV (a Hong Kong-based satellite TV station) and VOA. The transcripts and translations represent recordings of seven different programs.
A manual selection procedure was used to choose data appropriate for the GALE program, namely, conversation (talk) programs focusing on current events. Stories on topics such as sports, entertainment and business were excluded from the data set. The following table is a summary of the files included in this release.
| Source | Program | Epoch (YYYY.MM) | #hours | #characters |
| CCTV | Today's Focus | 2006.01 | 2.1 | 36,398 |
| Phoenix TV | Asian Journal | 2005.09 - 2005.11 | 2.5 | 27,876 |
| Behind the Headlines | 2006.01 | 1.5 | 7,170 | |
| A Date with Lu Yu | 2005.10 - 2006.01 | 10.9 | 129,782 | |
| News Hacker | 2005.10 - 2005.11 | 3.0 | 43,070 | |
| Passion on China | 2005.10 | 2.0 | 21,482 | |
| VOA | News08 | 2005.03 | 2.0 | 28,621 |
Transcription
The selected audio snippets were carefully transcribed by LDC annotators and professional transcription agencies following LDC's Quick Rich Transcription specification. Manual sentence units/segments (SU) annotation was also performed as part of the transcription task. Three types of end of sentence SU are identified:
- statement SU
- question SU
- incomplete SU
Translation
After transcription and SU annotation, files were reformatted into a human-readable translation format and assigned to professional translators for careful translation. Translators followed LDC's GALE Translation guidelines which describe the makeup of the translation team, the source data format, the translation data format, best practices for translating certain linguistic features (such as names and speech disfluencies) and quality control procedures applied to completed translations.
TDF Format
All final data are in Tab Delimited Format (TDF). TDF is compatible with other transcription formats, such as the Transcriber format and AG format, and it is easy to process.
Each line of a TDF file corresponds to a speech segment and contains 13 tab delimited fields:
| field | data_type | |
| 1 | file | unicode |
| 2 | channel | int |
| 3 | start | float |
| 4 | end | float |
| 5 | speaker | unicode |
| 6 | speakerType | unicode |
| 7 | speakerDialect | unicode |
| 8 | transcript | unicode |
| 9 | section | int |
| 10 | turn | int |
| 11 | segment | int |
| 12 | sectionType | unicode |
| 13 | suType | unicode |
A source TDF file and its translation are the same except that the transcript in the source TDF is replaced by its English translation.
Encoding
All data are encoded in UTF8.
Sponsorship
This work was supported in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, GALE Program Grant No. HR0011-06-1-0003. The content of this publication does not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the Government, and no official endorsement should be inferred.
Samples
For an example of the data in this corpus, please examine these screen captures of the text data:
