GALE Phase 4 Arabic Broadcast News Speech

Introduction

GALE Phase 4 Arabic Broadcast News Speech was developed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and is comprised of approximately 37 hours of Arabic broadcast news speech collected in 2008 and 2009 by LDC and MediaNet, Tunis, Tunisia and MTC, Rabat, Morocco during Phase 4 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) Program.

Corresponding transcripts are released as GALE Phase 4 Arabic Broadcast News Transcripts (LDC2018T14).

Broadcast audio for the GALE program was collected at LDC’s Philadelphia, PA USA facilities and at three remote collection sites: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Chinese), Medianet (Arabic) and MTC (Arabic). The combined local and outsourced broadcast collection supported GALE at a rate of approximately 300 hours per week of programming from more than 50 broadcast sources for a total of over 30,000 hours of collected broadcast audio over the life of the program.

LDC’s local broadcast collection system is highly automated, easily extensible and robust and capable of collecting, processing and evaluating hundreds of hours of content from several dozen sources per day. The broadcast material is served to the system by a set of free-to-air (FTA) satellite receivers, commercial direct satellite systems (DSS) such as DirecTV, direct broadcast satellite (DBS) receivers, and cable television (CATV) feeds. The mapping between receivers and recorders is dynamic and modular. All signal routing is performed under computer control, using a 256x64 A/V matrix switch. Programs are recorded in a high bandwidth A/V format and are then processed to extract audio, to generate keyframes and compressed audio/video, to produce time-synchronized closed captions (in the case of North American English) and to generate automatic speech recognition (ASR) output. An overview of the system, the sources recorded and the configuration of the recording laboratory are contained in the Guidelines for Broadcast Audio Collection Version 3.0 included in this release.

LDC designed a portable platform for remote broadcast collection. This is a TiVO-style digital video recording (DVR) system that records two streams of A/V material simultaneously. It supports analog CATV (NTSC and PAL) and FTA DVB-S satellite programming and can operate outside of the United States. It has a small footprint, weighs less than 30 pounds and can be transported as carry-on luggage.

Medianet collected Arabic programming from across the Gulf region using its internal system and LDC's portable broadcast collection platform installed in 2008. The portable platform deployed at the Medianet Tunisian collection facility collected multiple streams of regional Arabic programming from various sources. MTC collected Arabic programming using its internal collection system.

Data

The recordings in this release feature news broadcasts focusing principally on current events from the following sources: Abu Dhabi TV, a television station based in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; Al Arabiya, a news television station based in Dubai; Al Baghdadya , an Iraqi broadcast programmer; Alhurra, a U.S. government-funded regional broadcaster; Al Iraqiyah, an Iraqi television station; Aljazeera , a regional broadcaster located in Doha, Qatar; Al Ordiniyah, a national broadcast station in Jordan; Kuwait TV, a national broadcast station based in Kuwait; Radio Sawa, a U.S. government-funded regional broadcaster; Saudi TV, a national television station based in Saudi Arabia; Syria TV, the national television station in Syria; and Yemen TV, a television station based in Yemen.

This release contains 51 audio files presented in FLAC-compressed Waveform Audio File format (.flac), 16000 Hz single-channel 16-bit PCM. Each file was audited by a native Arabic speaker following Audit Procedure Specification Version 2.0 which is included in this release. The broadcast auditing process served three principal goals: as a check on the operation of the broadcast collection system equipment by identifying failed, incomplete or faulty recordings; as an indicator of broadcast schedule changes by identifying instances when the incorrect program was recorded; and as a guide for data selection by retaining information about a program’s genre, data type and topic.

Samples

Please listen to this audio sample.

Updates

None at this time.

Acknowledgment

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.