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

	  December 1994 Multi-Site Evaluation Test Material
                  
                       NIST Speech Disc 17-5.1
				   
			     March, 1995
 

This disc contains an evaluation test set drawn for the ATIS3 pool of
multi-site data to be used in the December 1994 ARPA SLS benchmark
tests.  This test set is similar in scope and content to previous
ATIS3 evaluation test sets.  

If you intend to implement the test protocols for the December 1994
ARPA SLS Benchmark Tests, do not examine the enclosed transcriptions
and documentation until after you have run the tests.  Index (*.ndx)
files have been included which specify the exact test material to be
used for each test under "atis3/sp_tst/dec94".  

Instructions for running the tests and preparing your results for
scoring by NIST are included in the file, "readme.doc" under the
"atis3/sp_tst/dec94" directory.  PLEASE READ THIS FILE IN ITS ENTIRETY
BEFORE EXAMINING ANY DATA OR DOCUMENTATION ON THIS DISC.

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

         atis3/ Waveforms, transcriptions, annotations, and documentation 
                for the December 1994 ATIS3 Evaluation 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.

     17_5_1.dir Directory of files on this disc

General information files named "readme.doc" have been included in the
high-level directories on this disc and describe the contents of the
directories.

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
(CD17-4.1) and Evaluation Test Data (this disc).  The revised PofI is
located under the "atis3/doc/pofi" directory.

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

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.