Meeting Recorder Naming Conventions

The goal of the naming conventions is to have consistent, short, and easy to use names for people, microphones, channels, etc. Each field is fixed length, so sorting and listing is easy. Finally, the convention is easily extended so that we or others can add data to the corpus.

Meeting IDs

An individual meeting (also called a session) is labeled with an alphanumeric tag. For example, "Bmr002". The tag consists of three fields. The first field must be alphabetic and all uppercase, and should be one letter. It represents the location of the recording. We reserve "B" for recordings at ICSI (Berkeley).

The second field must be alphabetic and all lowercase, and should have two letters. It represents the meeting type. The following tags are currently assigned:

TagMeeting Type
dbDatabase issues meeting
edEven Deeper Understanding weekly meeting
mrMeeting Recorder weekly meeting
nsNetwork Services and Applications group meeting
roRobustness weekly meeting
srSRI collaboration meeting
trMeeting Recorder transcriber's meeting
uwUW collaboration meeting

The final field must be numeric, consisting of three digits (e.g. "004").

Speaker IDs

Speaker tags consist of "m", "f", "u", or "x", for male, female, unknown, and computer-generated respectively, followed by "e" for native English speaker or "n" for non-native English speaker, followed by three numbers. The numbers should be unique across all speakers (e.g. there is only one person with a speaker ID ending in 003). For example, "fn002" and "me005" are both legal speaker IDs.

We have developed an XML database (icsi1.spk in the doc directory) containing speaker information, education level, language, age, etc. For details on the information we collect, see the comments in icsi1.spk and the online speaker form: http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/Speech/mr/speakerform.html.

Mic IDs

A microphone ID represents the type of microphone. It is separate from the transmission ID, which represents the method by which the signal gets to the recording equipment. A microphone ID consists of a letter and a number. The microphone IDs used at ICSI are:

TagDescription
s1Sony headset mic ECM-310BMP
s2Sony handheld mic WRT-807A
c1Crown headset mic CM 311 A/E
l1Sony lapel (lavalier) ECM-77BMP
p1Plantronics monaural headset mic (part number unknown)
a1Andrea monaural headset mic NC-50
u1Unknown monaural headset mic
u2Unknown earplug mic
c2Crown PZM desktop microphone
u3Unknown microphone in mockup PDA

Transmission IDs

The transmission ID represents the method by which the microphone is connected to the recording equipment. It is a letter followed by a number. The transmission IDs used at ICSI are:

TagDescription
j1Wired jack (via jimlet through jimbox)
w1Wireless Sony transmitter/receivers (Sony MB-806A modular base, WRU-806A/64 UHF synthesized tuner modules, WRT-805A bodypack transmitter)
w2Wireless Sony transmitter/receiver integrated into unit (e.g. Sony handset with integrated transmitter)
u1Unknown wired type (e.g. PZMs)

Questions or comments to: mrcontact@icsi.berkeley.edu