Stories Corpus
                            Release 1.2

              Center for Spoken Language Understanding


UPDATED: 22 September 2002


Overview
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The Stories Corpus is made up of extemporaneous speech collected from English 
speakers in the CSLU Multi-language Telephone Speech data collection. Each speaker 
was asked to speak on a topic of their choice for one minute. These utterances are 
make up the Stories Corpus.

The Stories Corpus comprises:

1. Speech files for the 702 calls

2. Time-aligned word level transcriptions (and corresponding comment
   files) for approximately 322 stories 

3. Word transcriptions (not time aligned) for 702 stories

4. Time-aligned phonetic labels for 702 stories 

Prompt
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The callers were responding to the following prompt:

"We now want you to talk for a longer period of time. We do not care what you say 
as long as you keep talking. You can tell us anything about yourself, your hobbies 
and interests, the city that you live in, and the sports that you like. Or you can 
make up a story, tell a fairy-tale or recite a poem. You will have 1 minute to speak.
We will now give you 10 seconds to think about what to say. Please do not read 
anything, we would prefer you make something up."