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Levantine Arabic Conversational Telephone Speech
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This database contains 982 Levantine Arabic speakers taking part in
spontaneous telephony conversations in Colloquial Levantine Arabic.  A
total of 985 conversation sides are provided (there are three speakers
who each appear in two disctinct conversations).  The average duration
per side is between 5 and 6 minutes, but since each call side is one
half of a conversation, there would be about 3 minutes of speech per
side, on average (5 to 6 minutes of speech per 2-channel audio file).

This corpus was collected and transcribed in 2004 by Appen Pty Ltd, Sydney,
Australia.

Audio Data
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The "audio" directory contains three subdirectories:

 devtest --  12 two-channel audio files
 train1c --   5 single-channel audio files
 train2c -- 478 two-channel audio files

The single-channel files represent just one side of a normal
conversation.  The "devtest" set represents a relatively balanced
(representative) sample drawn from the total pool of collected calls,
based on a test-set selection process applied by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and based on
demographic, phone and audit information as provided by Appen.

The file naming convention for the audio data is as follows:

 arb_lev-<DATE>_<TIME>-<CHANNEL>.sph   (for single-channel files)
 arb_lev-<DATE>_<TIME>.sph             (for two-channel files)

Where:  <DATE> = date of recording (YYYYMMDD)
        <TIME> = time of recording (HHMMSS, 24 hour clock)
        <CHANNEL> = "a" or "b"
        
The date and time are the time at the place of recording (i.e. Sydney,
Australia, where the recording platform was located).

All audio files are 8 kHz, 8-bit, a-law encoding, and have a NIST
SPHERE formatted header.  The sample data are not compressed.


Documentation Files
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The "doc" directory contains the following two tab-delimited table
files, which provide speaker demographics, audit results, and
phone-set information for the respective subsets of audio files/calls:

 devtest_calls.tab  --  12 rows
 training_calls.tab -- 483 rows (both single- and two-channel calls)

Both tables contain the following data fields (these column headings
are listed in the first line of each file):

 File-ID
 Date
 Time
 A-ID
 A-Region
 A-Age
 A-Gender
 A-Phone  (type)
 B-ID
 B-Region
 B-Age
 B-Gender
 B-Phone  (type)
 Topic   (assigned for conversation)
 Length  (MM:SS)

In the case of the single-channel training files, the fields
associated with the missing side are filled with "(na)".