Air Travel Information Service Phase III (ATIS3)
	  Speech and Natural Language Understanding Corpora

		   1994 Development Test Material
                  
                       NIST Speech Disc 17-4.2

			     March, 1995
				   
			   

The Air Travel Information Service (ATIS) domain was selected as a
common research domain to facilitate the development and common
evaluation of speech understanding systems within the Advanced
Research Projects Agency Spoken Language Technology Program.  

This disc contains a development test set drawn for the ATIS3 pool of
multi-site data.  This development test set is similar in scope and
content to ATIS3 evaluation test sets.  This disc serves as an
addendum to the ATIS3 training and evaluation test data previously
released on NIST speech discs 17-1, 17-2, and 17-3.  The test data on
this disc is comparable in size, scope, and annotation conventions to
the December 1994 Evaluation Test data on disc 17-5.1.  This data can
be used in system development testing before conducting evaluation
tests using the data on disc 17-5.1.


A summary of the contents of this disc is as follows:

     17_4_2.dir File containing directory of this disc.

         atis3/ Waveforms, transcriptions, annotations, and documentation 
                for the 1994 ATIS3 Development Test set.

          comp/ NIST comparator for scoring CAS-formatted answers output 
                from ATIS NL/SLS systems against reference answers.

        rdb4_0/ ATIS 46-city/52-airport relational database.

         score/ NIST speech recognition scoring software.  Includes 
	        dynamic programming string-alignment scoring code and
		statistical significance tests.

	sphere/ NIST SPeech HEader REsources toolkit.  Provides command-
	        line and programmer interface to NIST-headered speech 
	        waveform files.  Also provides for automatic decompression
	        of the Shorten-compressed waveform files on these discs.


General information files named "readme.doc" have been included in
the high-level directories and throughout the documentation directory
("atis3/doc") on this disc, 17-4.2, and describe the contents of the
directories.

Note that the waveforms on this disc have been compressed using
SPHERE-embedded Shorten.

The following papers contain a more detailed description of the ATIS
paradigm and corpora.  PostScript copies of these papers have been
included in the "atis3/doc" directory of this disc for your
convenience.

Hemphill, C.T., et al., "The ATIS Spoken Language Systems Pilot
  Corpus", Proc. DARPA Speech and Natural Language Workshop, Morgan
  Kaufmann Publishers, June 1990.  (tiatis90.ps)

Hirschman, L., et al., "Multi-Site Data Collection for a Spoken
  Language Corpus", Proc. DARPA Speech and Natural Language Workshop,
  Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, February 1992.  (madcow92.ps)

Hirschman, L., et al., "Multi-Site Data Collection and Evaluation in
  Spoken Language Understanding", Proc. ARPA Human Language Technology
  Workshop, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, March 1993.  (madcow93.ps)

Dahl, D., et al., "Expanding the Scope of the ATIS Taslk: The ATIS-3
  Corpus", Proc. ARPA Human Language Technology Workshop, Morgan
  Kaufmann Publishers, March 1994.  (madcow94.ps)


Note that the annotations on this disc conform to a new Principles of
Interpretation (PofI) document which is a revision from previous ATIS3
PofI.  This PofI pertains only to the 1994 Development Test Data (this
disc) and Evaluation Test Data (NIST Speech Disc 17-5.1).  The revised
PofI is located under the "atis3/doc/pofi" directory.

The collection of the ATIS3 corpus was sponsored by the Advanced
Research Projects Agency Software and Intelligent Systems Technology
Office (ARPA-SISTO).  The corpus was annotated by SRI international
and collated, documented and produced on CD-ROM by the National
Institute of Standards and Technology under the sponsorship of the
Linguistic Data Consortium.