USC-SFI MALACH Interviews and Transcripts English – Speech Recognition Edition

Introduction

USC-SFI MALACH Interviews and Transcripts English – Speech Recognition Edition was developed by IBM as part of the MALACH (Multilingual Access to Large Spoken ArCHives) Project. This edition augments USC-SFI MALACH Interviews and Transcripts English (LDC2012S05) by modifying and updating a subset of the original corpus for use with the Kaldi toolkit in speech recognition work, and is easily portable for use by other speech recognition systems as well. It contains approximately 168 hours of interviews from 682 Holocaust witnesses along with transcripts, a lexicon, Kaldi specific files, and other documentation.

Inspired by his experience making Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg established the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in 1994 to gather video testimonies from survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust. While most of those who gave testimony were Jewish survivors, the Foundation also interviewed homosexual survivors, Jehovah’s Witness survivors, liberators and liberation witnesses, political prisoners, rescuers and aid providers, Roma and Sinti (Gypsy) survivors, survivors of eugenics policies, and war crimes trials participants. The Foundation’s Visual History Archive holds nearly 55,000 video testimonies in 43 languages, representing 65 countries; it is the largest archive of its kind in the world. In 2006, the Foundation became part of the Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and was renamed as the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education.

The goal of the MALACH project was to develop methods for improved access to large multinational spoken archives; the focus was advancing the state of the art of automatic speech recognition and information retrieval. The characteristics of the USC-SFI collection -- unconstrained, natural speech filled with disfluencies, heavy accents, age-related coarticulations, un-cued speaker and language switching and emotional speech -- were considered well-suited for that task. The work centered on five languages: English, Czech, Russian, Polish and Slovak.

LDC has also released USC-SFI MALACH Interviews and Transcripts Czech (LDC2014S04).

Data

The original MALACH English data set (LDC2012S05) consists of unsegmented audio interviews in mp2 format and speaker-turn, time-marked transcripts in Transcriber (.trs) format presented in a single flat file. In this release, the speech files are segmented and converted to flac format, and the transcripts are updated to an utterance-by-utterance format. Additionally, a lexicon mapping words to phonemes is provided, and the data is divided into development and training sets.

See the included documentation for more details on these changes, and the documentation and catalog entry for LDC2012S05 for further information about the source files.

Samples

Please view the following samples. Approximately 40 seconds of silence was left at the start of the speech file to preserve the time stamps' accuracy.

• Speech
• Segments
• Transcript

Updates

None at this time.