GALE Phase 2 Chinese BN Parallel Text Part 1 Authors: Lauren Friedman, Hubert Jin, Zhiyi Song, Gary Krug, Stephanie Strassel 1.0 Introduction This file contains documentation for GALE Phase 2 Chinese BN Parallel Text part 1. Along with other corpora, the parallel text in this release comprised training data for Phase 2 of the DARPA GALE Program. This corpus contains Chinese source text and corresponding English translations for 198,350 tokens, selected from Broadcast News (BN) 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_Chinese_translation_guidelines_v2_9.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 30 source-translation document pairs, comprising 198,350 characters of translated data. Data is drawn from 18 distinct Chinese broadcast news (BN) sources. The following table is a summary of the files included in this release. Source Program Epoch tokens CCTV1 30MINNEWS 2006.04 5605 CCTV4 DAILYNEWS 2005.10 7134 CCTV4 DAILYNEWS 2006.04 5275 CCTV4 DAILYNEWS 2006.07 8208 CCTV4 DAILYNEWS 2007.01 4211 CCTV4 DAILYNEWS 2007.01 4514 CCTV4 DAILYNEWS 2007.01 4641 CCTV4 DAILYNEWS 2007.01 4262 CCTV4 NEWS3 2005.09 6857 CCTV4 NEWS3 2007.01 7113 CCTV7 MILITARYNEWS1 2006.03 6412 CCTV7 MILITARYNEWS1 2006.04 5646 CCTV7 MILITARYNEWS2 2006.04 5658 CCTVNEWS HARDNEWS 2006.04 6729 CCTVNEWS NEWS8 2006.05 8093 CCTVNEWS NEWS8 2006.05 6895 JIANGSU LEGALTALK 2006.04 2075 NTDTV NTDNEWS12 2005.10 6254 NTDTV NTDNEWS19 2005.10 3720 PHOENIX ASIANJRNL 2005.12 8977 PHOENIX ASIANJRNL 2006.03 9364 PHOENIX ASIANJRNL 2006.06 9843 PHOENIX ASIANJRNL 2006.07 10547 PHOENIX GOODMORNCN 2006.05 7690 PHOENIX GOODMORNCN 2007.01 7235 PHOENIX GOODMORNCN 2007.01 6870 PHOENIX GOODMORNCN 2007.01 7298 PHOENIX GOODMORNCN 2007.01 7041 PHOENIX GOODMORNCN 2007.01 7620 PHOENIX PHNXWRLD 2007.01 6563 Token counts are expressed in terms of words for Arabic (using the regular expression w+) and characters for Chinese (using the regular expression w) and are taken from the selected segments of 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 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 Mandarin Chinese), 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 25 April, 2012 Zhiyi Song