DARPA Resource Management Continuous Speech Database 
                                   (RM1)
 
                     Speaker-Dependent Training Data 
                        NIST Corpus 2-1.1 and 2-2.1
 

   This corpus is a collection of recordings of spoken sentences pertaining
to a naval resource management task.  It consists of two primary sections:
one section, which was designed for speaker-independent recognition
evaluation, consists of a few utterances from each of 160 subjects, while the
second section, designed for speaker-dependent recognition studies, consists
of many utterances from each of only 12 speakers.  Subjects read the
sentences from written prompts in very low background noise.  The material
was recorded using a Sennheiser SN 414 headset microphone and simultaneously
digitized at 20 Khz. into 16-bit samples.  Each recording session was then
downsampled to 16 Khz. and segmented into files corresponding to individual
sentence-utterances.  Most of these sentence-utterances are approximately 3
to 5 seconds in duration.  All of the sentences are consistent with a very
limited language model that allows queries about ships, ports, etc., along
with display adjustments, but little else.  There is no "official" language
model, but a crude grammar that generates all of the recorded sentences is
included in these materials.  The corpus has been furthur divided into
portions for training, development testing, and final evaluative testing. 
  
   This two-CD-ROM set (NIST discs 2-1.1 and 2-2.1) comprises all of the
speaker-dependent training data for the database.  These discs contain 7344
NIST-headered speech sphere files as well as several documentation files. 
Because all of the speaker-dependent training files would not fit on one CD-
ROM, they have been divided so that all of the material for 6 (of the 12)
speakers appears on each disc.  The online documentation has been duplicated
on each disc for your convenience.

This set is the first in a series of CD-ROM-based speech and language corpora
being prepared by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
and distributed through the National Technical Information Service (NTIS). 
Development and preparation of this database was made possible by support
from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information
Science and Technology Office.  

Speaker-Dependent Training Material
-----------------------------------
These discs contain the following speech data for each of 12 speakers:

       2 dialect calibration sentences (files sa[1-2].sph)
      10 rapid adaptation sentences (files sb[01-10].sph)
     600 speaker-dependent training sentences (files sx[001-600].sph
     ---
     612 total sentences per speaker


CD-ROM Directory Structure
--------------------------
The CD-ROMs' directory hierarchy is structured so that a full path/filename
uniquely identifies an utterance (the database, data usage, speaker, and
sentence).  The directories are structured as follows:

<DATABASE-FILE> ::= <SPEECH-FILE-SPEC> | <DOC-FILE-SPEC> | <README-SPEC>

  <SPEECH-FILE-SPEC> ::= /<DATABASE>/<USAGE>/<SPEAKER_DIR>/<SPEECHFILE>

    <USAGE> ::= dep_trn

    <SPEAKER_DIR> ::= <SPEAKER_ID>_<DIALECT>
      <SPEAKER_ID> ::= bef0 | ... | tab0
      <DIALECT> ::= 1 | 2 | ... | 8

    <SPEECHFILE> ::= sa1.sph | ... | sr600.sph

  <DOC-FILE-SPEC> :: = /<DATABASE>/doc/<DOCFILE>
    <DOCFILE> ::= documentation files and directories (see below)

  <README-SPEC> ::= /<DATABASE>/readme.txt

<DATABASE> ::= RM1


Example directories and files:

/                             (CD-ROM root directory)
rm1/                         (database identification)
rm1/dep_trn/                 (speaker-dependent training data usage)
rm1/dep_trn/bef0_3           (speaker "bef0", dialect region "3")
     .
     .
rm1/dep_trn/tab0_7           (speaker "tab0", dialect region "7")
rm1/dep_trn/bef0_3/sa1.sph   (speech sphere file containing an utterance
     .                         of sentence "sa1")
     .
rm1/dep_trn/bef0_3/sr600.sph (speech sphere file containing an utterance
                               of sentence "sr600"
rm1/doc/                     (online documentation and tables - see below
                               for file descriptions)
rm1/readme.txt               (this file)


Online Documentation
--------------------
The following documentation files can be found in the rm1/doc directory:

     al_sents.snr - Complete listing of all RM Database sentences in SNOR
                    form. *
     al_sents.txt - Complete listing of all RM Database sentences in prompt
                    form. 
     dt_scrpt.txt - Table listing the speakers in this set and the scripts
                    of sentences they spoke.  The scripts are located in the
                    the rm1/doc/scripts directory.
     dt_sents.snr - Listing of sentences on this set SNOR form. *
     dt_sents.txt - Listing of sentences on this set in prompt form.
     dt_spkrs.txt - Table describing the speakers on this set.
     header.def   - NIST header object definitions.
     lexicon.snr  - Complete Resource Management lexicon in SNOR form. *
     not_used.txt - List of valid RM sentences not used in the corpus.
     scripts/     - Directory containing lists of sentence identifiers.
                    Each list (script) indexes the order of sentences
                    spoken in one recording sessions.
     wp_gram.txt  - BBN's Resource Managment Word-Pair Grammar.

*  SNOR, short for Standard Normalized Orthographic Representation, 
   is a uniform way of writing English words and sentences.  

NIST Header Structure
---------------------
These (and future) CD-ROMs employ the new NIST speech file header structure. 
The header is an object-oriented, 1024-byte fixed-length, entirely ASCII
structure.  The header is composed of a fixed portion followed by a object-
oriented variable portion.  The fixed portion is as follows:

NIST_1A<new-line>
   1024<new-line>

The first line specifies the header type and the second line specifies the
header length.  Each of these lines are 8 bytes long (including new-line) and
are structured to identifiy the header as well as allow those who do not wish
to read the subsequent header information to programatically skip over it.

The remaining object-oriented variable portion is composed of object-type-
value "triples" which have the following format:

<FORMAT> ::= <OBJECT><space><TYPE><space><VALUE><new-line>
  <OBJECT> ::= <PRIMARY-SUBOBJECT> | <PRIMARY-SUBOBJECT><SECONDARY-SUBOBJECT>
  <PRIMARY-SUBOBJECT> ::= <ALPHA> | <ALPHA><ALPHA-NUM-STRING>
  <SECONDARY_SUBOBJECT> ::= _<ALPHA-NUM-STRING> | 
                            _<ALPHA-NUM-STRING><SECONDARY-SUBOBJECT>

  <TYPE> ::= -<INTEGER-FLAG> | -<REAL-FLAG> | -<STRING-FLAG>
    <INTEGER-FLAG> ::= i
    <REAL-FLAG> ::= r
    <STRING-FLAG> ::= s<DIGIT-STRING>
      
  <VALUE> ::= <INTEGER> | <REAL> | <STRING>  (depending on object type)
    <INTEGER> ::= <SIGN><DIGIT-STRING>

    <REAL> ::= <SIGN><DIGIT-STRING>.<DIGIT-STRING> 

    <STRING> =  <CHARACTER> | <CHARACTER><STRING>

<ALPHA-NUM-STRING> ::= <ALPHA-NUM> | <ALPHA-NUM><ALPHA-NUM-STRING>
<ALPHA-NUM> ::= <DIGIT> | <ALPHA>
<ALPHA> ::= a | ... | z | A | ... | Z
<DIGIT-STRING> ::= <DIGIT> | <DIGIT><DIGIT-STRING>
<DIGIT> ::= 0 | ... | 9
<SIGN> ::= + | - | NULL
<CHARACTER> ::= char(0) | char(1) | ... | char(255)

The currently defined objects (used in this database) are defined in the file
rm1/doc/header.def.  (Note: The list of objects in header.def may be
expanded for future databases as no order or number of objects is imposed on
this header structure.  The file header.def is simply a repository for
"legal" object definitions.)

The single object "end_head" marks the end of the active header and the
remaining unused header space is undefined.

The following is an example header from the Resource Management database:

NIST_1A 
   1024 
database_id -s3 RM1 
database_version -s3 1.0 
utterance_id -s8 bef0_sa1 
channel_count -i 1 
sample_count -i 42292 
sample_rate -i 16000 
sample_min -i -2868 
sample_max -i 4015 
sample_n_bytes -i 2 
sample_byte_format -s2 01 
sample_sig_bits -i 16 
end_head 

A document will be forthcoming which describes the header structure in
greater detail and basic "C" software modules will be available in the future
for header generation an manipulation.