MATERIAL Swahili-English Language Pack
| Item Name: | MATERIAL Swahili-English Language Pack |
| Author(s): | Nicola Amott, Aric Bills, Judith Bishop, Anne Boyle, Sarra Chouder, Nathaniel Clair, Tom Conners, Cassian Corey, Eyal Dubinski, Corinna Ellis, Paul Gibby, Simon Hammond, Luke Hartwig, Maxime Hubert, Vivian Lusweti, Tina Semiti Magembe, Valerie Novak, Maureen Oluoch, Cynthia Onyango, Bella Yahuma, Julie Yelle, Jennifer Yu, Ilya Zavorin |
| LDC Catalog No.: | LDC2026S01 |
| ISLRN: | 740-824-029-409-4 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.35111/h4s6-3y31 |
| Release Date: | January 15, 2026 |
| Member Year(s): | 2026 |
| DCMI Type(s): | Sound, Text |
| Sample Type: | alaw |
| Sample Rate: | 8000 |
| Data Source(s): | telephone conversations |
| Application(s): | information retrieval, speech recognition |
| Language(s): | English, Swahili |
| Language ID(s): | eng, swa |
| License(s): |
MATERIAL Swahili-English Agreement (For-Profit) MATERIAL Swahili-English Agreement (Non-Member) MATERIAL Swahili-English Agreement (Not-For-Profit) |
| Online Documentation: | LDC2026S01 Documents |
| Licensing Instructions: | Subscription & Standard Members, and Non-Members |
| Citation: | Amott, Nicola, et al. MATERIAL Swahili-English Language Pack LDC2026S01. Web Download. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, 2026. |
| Related Works: | View |
Introduction
MATERIAL Swahili-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 112 hours of Swahili 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 Swahili speech in this release represents that spoken in the Nairobi dialect region of Kenya. The gender distribution among speakers is approximately equal; speakers' ages range from 16 years to 69 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 30% of the speech data, and approximately 3% of the speech data was translated into English. Further information about transcription and translation methodologies is contained in the documentation accompanying this release.
Swahili-English Language Pack also includes domain annotations, English queries and their relevance annotations.
Speech data is presented either as two channel wav or single channel sphere files, predominately in 8kHz A-law format. Some files are 48kHz and single channel. All text data is UTF-8 encoded.
Samples
Please view these samples:
Updates
No updates at this time.