README FOR THE FISHER SPANISH 2006 CORPUS
                        Speech and Transcripts

This corpus contains 819 telephone conversations of 10 to 12 minutes
in duration, with 136 speakers participating.  The collection was done 
by the LDC, using a robot operator system in Philadelphia, PA.  Native 
speakers of Latin American Spanish were recruited from the within the 
domestic U.S. and Puerto Rico.

A full orthographic transcript is provided for each conversation, along
with the original digital audio, in the form of 2-channel mu-law sample
data with 8000 samples per second (as captured from the public telephone
network).

The audio files are in NIST SPHERE format (1024-byte ASCII file headers).
The transcript files are in plain-text, tab-delimited format (tdf), with 
UTF-8 character encoding.  These files were created by the LDC-developed 
transcription tool called "xtrans", which is available from the LDC:

 http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/tools/XTrans/

The first line of each transcript file provides the column headings; the 
next two lines are "comments" that can be ignored (these are used by 
xtrans; they are distinguished from non-comment lines by having an 
initial semicolon ";").  Actual transcript data, with time stamps, 
channel number, transcript text and additional information, begins at 
line 4 of each transcript file.

The "doc" directory contains comma-delimited tables providing information
about the calls and the subjects (speakers).  There is also a document
file (in Microsoft Word format) that explains the transcription
conventions used for this corpus.