GALE Phase 2 Arabic BC Parallel Text Part 2 Authors: Lauren Friedman, Hubert Jin, Zhiyi Song, Gary Krug, Stephanie Strassel 1.0 Introduction This file contains documentation for GALE Phase 2 Arabic BC Parallel Text Part 2. Along with other corpora, the parallel text in this release comprised training data for Phase 2 of the DARPA GALE Program. This corpus contains Modern Standard Arabic(MSA) source text and corresponding English translations for 169,488 words, selected from Broadcast Conversation (BC) data collected and transcribed in GALE. The audio corresponding to the source files in this release are distributed separately. 2.0 Package Structure This package comprises two directories: data/ The data directory is divided into the "source" directory and "translation directory. The "source" directory contains files in the source language. The "translation" directory contains the translated files. File names refer to the data source, source language and collection date, e.g. {SRC}_{PRG}_{LNG}_YYYYMMDD_hhmmss(.fileTypeExtension) where - {SRC} is the source ID (e.g., CNN, VOA, etc.) - {PRG} is the program ID (e.g., LARRYKING, etc.) - {LNG} is the three-letter language ID defined in the ISO639-3. ARB is Standard Arabic; CMN is Chinese, Mandarin; ENG is English. - YYYYMMDD is the data collection (broadcast) date. - hhmmss is the start time of the program (hh is the hour in the 24-hour format) File stems for source and translation file pairs are the same. Source files use the .tdf extension, while translation files use the eng.tdf extension. docs/ The docs directory contains documentation related to the release. docs/README.txt - this file docs/doc_list.txt - inventory of source and translation files with the token count for each file docs/file_list.txt - inventory of files in this release docs/GALE_Arabic_Translation_Guidelines_V2_7.pdf - translation guidelines docs/GALE_TranscriptionTranslationMarkup_V25.xls - explanation of special symbols docs/program_summary.txt -- audio programs in this release docs/TDF_format.txt -- TDF format description 3.0 Contents This release includes 29 source-translation document pairs, comprising 169,488 words of Arabic source and their English translation. Data is drawn from thirteen distinct Arabic broadcast conversation (BC) sources. BC programming is more interactive than traditional broadcast news sources and may include talk shows, interviews, call-in programs and roundtables. The following table is a summary of the files by data source included in this release. Source Program Epoch tokens ALJZWEB BEHINDNEWS 2006.03 2815 ALJZWEB BEHINDNEWS 2006.03 1845 ALJZWEB BEHINDNEWS 2006.06 2961 ALJZWEB BEHINDNEWS 2006.07 2692 ALJZWEB BEHINDNEWS 2006.07 2370 ALJZWEB FROMWASH 2006.01 5433 ALJZWEB FROMWASH 2006.01 5154 ALJZWEB FROMWASH 2006.05 5337 ALJZWEB MOREOPINION 2004.12 8812 ALJZWEB MOREOPINION 2006.03 4195 ALJZWEB MOREOPINION 2006.04 5493 ALJZWEB MOREOPINION 2006.04 5753 ALJZWEB MOREOPINION 2006.06 5681 ALJZWEB OPENDIAL 2004.11 7647 ALJZWEB OPENDIAL 2005.01 8892 ALJZWEB OPENDIAL 2005.12 6200 ALJZWEB OPPDIREC 2005.04 8732 ALJZWEB OPPDIREC 2005.05 7529 ALJZWEB OPPDIREC 2005.10 5751 ALJZWEB OPPDIREC 2006.03 6561 ALJZWEB SPECIALVISIT 2006.06 4765 ALJZWEB WITHOUTBOUNDS 2004.09 10146 ALJZWEB WITHOUTBOUNDS 2004.10 10027 ALJZWEB WITHOUTBOUNDS 2004.12 6415 ALJZWEB WITHOUTBOUNDS 2005.02 7446 ALJZWEB WITHOUTBOUNDS 2005.04 4117 ALJZWEB WITHOUTBOUNDS 2006.03 5936 ALJZWEB WITHOUTBOUNDS 2006.04 4578 SCOLA EGYPNNSCO 2007.01 6205 Token counts are expressed in terms of words for Arabic (using the regular expression w+) taken from the source data. The file called docs/file_list.txt contains a complete list of files in the package. The file docs/doc_list.txt contains the inventory of documents with the token count for each file. 3.1 TDF Format Source data and translations are distributed in TDF format. TDF files are tab-delimited text files containing one segment of text along with meta information about that segment. Each field in the TDF file is described in docs/TDF_format.txt. A source TDF file and its translation are the same except that the transcript in the source TDF is replaced by its English translation. 3.2 Encoding All data are encoded in UTF8. 4.0 Translation Pipeline A manual selection procedure was used to choose data appropriate for translation and distribution to GALE. Selection criteria included linguistic features (is the file in MSA), transcription features (is the transcription good enough to produce a viable translation) and topic features (does the file contain news, current events or human interest topics). Before audio files can be translated, they must be transcribed. The files in this release were transcribed by LDC staff and/or transcription vendors under contract to LDC. In addition to producing a verbatim transcript, transcribers also indicate sentence boundaries. Sentence boundaries and overall transcript quality were verified by LDC staff before sending files out for translation. After transcription and SU annotation, files were reformatted into a human- readable translation format and were assigned to translation vendors under contract to LDC. Translators followed LDC's GALE Translation guidelines, which describe the makeup of the translation team, the source data format, the translation data format, best practices for translating certain linguistic features (such as names and speech disfluencies), and quality control procedures applied to completed translations. Transcribers and translators used special markup to indicate particular linguistic features, for instance unintelligible speech, partial words and typos in the transcript; these uses are described in the documentation accompanying this release. After translations were completed, bilingual LDC staff performed quality control by selecting a proportional sample from each delivery and scrutinizing it for several kinds of mistakes, as described in the translation guidelines. Low quality translations were returned to the translators for revision. After quality control is complete, translation files were validated and reformatted into the release format. 5.0 Sanity Checks LDC performed the following corpus-wide checks and corrected all errors found: -- Number of source segments matches number of translation segments for all files (except full source text) -- Timestamps are identical between selected source and translation -- All non-blank source segments correspond to non-blank translation segments -- All translation files have a corresponding full source file selected source file, and index file -- All files contain only UTF-8 encoded characters, although they may contain non-ascii characters such as Western European characters -- Punctuation in translations is ASCII punctuation 6.0 Acknowledgement This work was supported in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, GALE Program Grant No. HR0011-06-1-0003. The content of this publication does not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the Government, and no official endorsement should be inferred. 7.0 Content Copyright [To be supplied by Publications/IPR] ---- README Created 29 June, 2011 Gary Krug Updated 31 January, 2011 Zhiyi Song Updated 20 February, 2012 Stephanie Strassel Updated 13 March, 2012 Zhiyi Song