GALE Phase 3 and 4 Arabic BN Parallel Text Part 1 Authors: Zhiyi Song, Gary Krug, Stephanie Strassel 1.0 Introduction This file contains documentation for GALE Phase 3 and 4 Arabic BN Parallel Text Part 1. Along with other corpora, the parallel text in this release comprised training data for Phase 3 and 4 of the DARPA GALE Program. This corpus contains Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) source text and corresponding English translations for 159,457 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_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 41 source-translation document pairs, comprising 159,457 words of translated data. Data is drawn from 22 distinct Arabic broadcast news (BN) sources. The following table is a summary of the files by data source included in this release. Source Program Epoch tokens ABUDHABI ABUDHNEWS 2007.01 5156 ABUDHABI ABUDHNEWS 2007.01 5370 ABUDHABI ABUDHNEWS 2007.01 5200 ALAM NEWSRPT 2007.01 4531 ALAM NEWSRPT 2007.01 5686 ALBAGHDADYA BAGHDADYANEWS 2008.03 3086 ALBAGHDADYA BAGHDADYANEWS 2008.04 3280 ALHURRA ALHURRANEWS1 2008.03 6172 ALHURRA THEGLOBAL 2008.01 6925 ALHURRA THEGLOBAL 2008.01 5410 ALHURRA THEGLOBAL 2008.02 5982 ALHURRA THEWORLDNOW 2008.01 3176 ALHURRA THEWORLDTODAY 2008.01 6272 ALHURRA THEWORLDTODAY 2008.02 6518 ALJZ TODHARV 2007.01 6070 ALJZ TODHARV 2007.01 3368 ALJZ TODHARV 2007.02 6676 ALJZ TODHARV 2007.02 6142 ALJZ TODHARV 2007.02 6414 ALSHARQIYA SHARQIYANEWS 2008.03 1274 ALURDUNYA URDUNYANEWS 2007.03 2274 ARABIYA ALARABIYANEWS2 2007.03 2450 ARABIYA ALARABIYANEWS2 2007.03 2682 ARABIYA ALARABIYANEWS2 2008.04 5445 ARABIYA LATEHRNEWS 2007.02 5740 DUBAISCO DUBAINEWS 2007.01 2693 DUBAI DUBAINEWS2 2007.03 2372 DUBAI DUBAINEWS2 2008.04 2136 IRAQIYAH ECONRPT 2007.01 1073 IRAQIYAH ECONRPT 2007.01 1759 IRAQIYAH ECONRPT 2007.02 1674 IRAQIYAH IRAQTDY 2007.01 2229 IRAQIYAH IRAQTDY 2007.02 3287 KUWAITTV NEWS 2007.01 2769 KUWAITTV NEWS 2007.01 2382 KUWAITTV NEWS 2007.02 2058 LBC NEWS 2007.01 6112 SAUDITV SAUDINEWS2 2008.04 4464 SAWA SAWANEWS 2008.02 633 SAWA SAWANEWS 2008.03 799 SAWA SAWANEWS 2008.03 1718 Token counts are expressed in terms of words for Arabic (using the regular expression w+) and are 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 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 professional translators for careful translation. 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 30 April, 2012 Zhiyi Song