Switchboard-1 Release 2
| Item Name: | Switchboard-1 Release 2 |
| Author(s): | John J. Godfrey, Edward Holliman |
| LDC Catalog No.: | LDC97S62 |
| ISBN: | 1-58563-121-3 |
| ISLRN: | 988-076-156-109-5 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.35111/sw3h-rw02 |
| Member Year(s): | 1993, 1997 |
| DCMI Type(s): | Sound |
| Sample Type: | 2-channel ulaw |
| Sample Rate: | 8000 |
| Data Source(s): | telephone conversations |
| Project(s): | EARS, GALE, Hub5-LVCSR, NIST SRE |
| Application(s): | speaker identification, speech recognition |
| Language(s): | English |
| Language ID(s): | eng |
| License(s): |
LDC User Agreement for Non-Members |
| Online Documentation: | LDC97S62 Documents |
| Licensing Instructions: | Subscription & Standard Members, and Non-Members |
| Citation: | Godfrey, John J., and Edward Holliman. Switchboard-1 Release 2 LDC97S62. Web Download. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, 1993. |
| Related Works: | View |
Introduction
Switchboard-1 Release 2 was developed by Texas Instruments in 1990-1991 and consists of approximately 260 hours of conversational telephone speech. It is a revised and corrected version of Release 1, published by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and distributed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) in 1993.
Switchboard is a collection of around 2,400 two-sided telephone conversations among 543 speakers (302 male, 241 female) from all areas of the United States. A computer-driven robot operator system handled the calls, giving the caller appropriate recorded prompts, selecting and dialing another person (the callee) to take part in a conversation, introducing a topic for discussion and recording the speech from the two subjects into separate channels until the conversation was finished. About 70 topics were provided, of which about 50 were used frequently. Selection of topics and callees was constrained so that: (1) no two speakers would converse together more than once; and (2) no one spoke more than once on a given topic.
Data
In this release assembled and published by LDC, all known errors in the original publication of speech files were corrected. In addition, modifications were made to the contents of the NIST Sphere headers of all speech files to identify each file as being part of the new release and to show the sample_count header field consistent with standard Sphere usage, specifically, to reflect the number of samples on each channel in the file. In Release 1, that field was improperly set to show the total number of samples in both channels.
Three speech files from Release 1 were inadvertently omitted from Release 2 and were subsequently added to this release. After corpus users noted some problems in the original speaker attribution table, LDC audited problem calls and corrected those attributions.
Since the publication of Release 2, the Switchboard orthographic transcripts were revised at The Institute for Signal and Information Processing (ISIP) and additional problems were discovered and repaired. The most recent version of ISIP transcriptions, the ISIP update of the phonetic transcriptions developed by the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), and corrected word alignments are available at ISIP.
Researchers have used Switchboard-1 data for various annotation projects including discourse annotation/speech acts, part-of-speech tagging and parsing, up-to-date orthographic transcriptions, and phonetic transcriptions. A summary documenting the files used for those various annotations is included in the corpus documentation.
Samples
Please view this audio sample.
Updates
08/11/2015: The three files from the 03/26/2013 update were converted into unshortened sphere. File tables and documentation were updated to reflect the conversion of these files. The corpus is also available as a web download. All copies of this corpus obtained after the above date include this update.
03/26/2013: Three previously missing files were added to this release. (sw02289.sph, sw04361.sph, sw04379.sph). File tables and documentation were updated to reflect the addition of these files. All copies of this corpus obtained after the above date include this update.
09/29/2011: Added a file list to the corpus documentation to reflect its release on DVD. Also, an updated readme reflects these changes.
09/2008: The Switchboard Dialog Act Corpus is a version of Switchboard-1 Release 2 tagged with a shallow discourse tagset of approximately 60 basic dialog act tags and combinations. The discourse tag-set used is an augmentation of the Discourse Annotation and Markup System of Labeling (DAMSL) tag-set and is referred to as the SWBD-DAMSL labels. These annotations were created in 1997 at the University of Colorado at Boulder with the goal of building better language models for automatic speech recognition of the Switchboard domain. To that end, the label-set incorporates both traditional sociolinguistic and discourse-theoretic rhetorical relations/adjacency-pairs as well as some more form-based models. This corpus contains labels for 1155 5-minute conversations comprising 205,000 utterances and 1.4 million words. The Switchboard Dialog Act Corpus is accessible in the corpus documentation.
11/12/2007: Updated and corrected speaker and call tables are available in the corpus documentation.