MATERIAL Somali-English Language Pack
| Item Name: | MATERIAL Somali-English Language Pack |
| Author(s): | Zeinab Abdi, Zahra Ali, Aric Bills, Judith Bishop, Anne Boyle, Sarra Chouder, Nathaniel Clair, Tom Conners, Cassian Corey, Eyal Dubinski, Corinna Ellis, Jess Fernando, Paul Gibby, Farah H Abdi, Simon Hammond, Maxime Hubert, Alice Kaiser-Schatzlein, Michael Kazi, Julie Lam, Rosie Lazar, Hanh Le, Michael Levot, Nicolas Malyska, Jennifer Melot, Alyssa Mensch, Abdulkadir Arale Omar, Shelley Paget, Frederick Richardson, Carl Rubino, Bern Samko, Gregory Sanders, Stephanie Soh, Tania E. Strahan, Jonathan Taylor, Brian Thompson, Audrey Tong, Richard Tong, Julie Yelle, Jennifer Yu, Ilya Zavorin |
| LDC Catalog No.: | LDC2024S10 |
| ISLRN: | 462-281-226-328-3 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.35111/5550-f323 |
| Release Date: | September 16, 2024 |
| Member Year(s): | 2024 |
| DCMI Type(s): | Sound, Text |
| Sample Type: | alaw |
| Sample Rate: | 8000 |
| Data Source(s): | telephone conversations |
| Application(s): | information retrieval, speech recognition |
| Language(s): | Somali, English |
| Language ID(s): | som, eng |
| License(s): |
MATERIAL Somali-English Agreement (For-Profit) MATERIAL Somali-English Agreement (Non-Member) MATERIAL Somali-English Agreement (Not-For-Profit) |
| Online Documentation: | LDC2024S10 Documents |
| Licensing Instructions: | Subscription & Standard Members, and Non-Members |
| Citation: | Abdi, Zeinab, et al. MATERIAL Somali-English Language Pack LDC2024S10. Web Download. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, 2024. |
| Related Works: | View |
Introduction
MATERIAL Somali-English Language Pack was developed by Appen for the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) MATERIAL (Machine Translation for English Retrieval of Information in Any Language) program. It contains approximately 80 hours of Somali conversational telephone speech, transcripts, English translations, annotations and queries.
The MATERIAL program focused on underserved languages with the ultimate goal to build cross language information retrieval systems to find speech and text content using English search queries.
Data
The Somali speech in this release represents that spoken in the Northern and Benaadir dialect regions of Somalia. The gender distribution among speakers is approximately equal; speakers' ages range from 16 years to 60 years. Calls were made using different telephones (e.g., mobile, landline) from a variety of environments including the street, a home or office, a public place, and inside a vehicle.
Transcripts cover approximately 10% of the speech data, and approximately 4% of the speech data was translated into English. Further information about transcription and translation methodologies is contained in the documentation accompanying this release.
Somali-English Language Pack also includes domain annotations, English queries and their relevance annotations. Annotators marked transcripts by domain (e.g., lifestyle, business-and-commerce, sports, education, and so on), by query (simple, conceptual, hybrid) and by their relevance to query search terms.
Speech data is presented either as two channel wav or single channel sphere files, predominately in 8kHz A-law format, with some wav files at a sample rate of 48kHz. All text data is UTF-8 encoded.
Samples
Please view the following samples:
Updates
None at this time.