Description of the Switchboard-2 Phase I telephone speech corpus
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May, 1998


	Project Leader:			David Graff
	
	Programming:			George Zipperlin
					Zhibiao Wu

	Personnel:			Alexandra Canavan

	Recruiters:			Elisa Munoz-Franco
					Liz O'Connor
					Kara Rennert
					Yuan Shan Tung
					


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	Switchboard-2 Phase I consists of 3,638 5-minute telephone
conversations involving 657 participants. This corpus was collected by
the Linguistic Data Consortium, (LDC) in support of a project on
Speaker Recognition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense.

	Speakers were solicited by the LDC to participate in this
telephone speech collection effort via the internet, publications
(advertisements), and personal contacts.  Potential participants
responded from all areas of the United States, although the majority
of the subjects were from the Mid-Atlantic area: (PA=303), (NJ=116),
(NY=53), (DE=13), (CT=12), (MD=14), (OH=13), and (MA=8). Most of the
participants in SWB-2 Phase I were college students from the following
universities: Penn State University, University of Delaware,
University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, and Rutgers University.
Of the 657 participants, 358 were female and 299 were male. An LDC
recruiter asked all participants for the following demographic
information: age, sex, years of completed education, country of birth,
and city and state where raised. You will find this information in
"spkrinfo.tbl."
	
	Each recruit was asked to participate in at least 10, 5-minute
phone calls.  Ideally each participant would receive 5 calls at a
designated number and make 5 calls from phones with different
telephone numbers (ANI codes).  The average subject participated in 11
conversations; however, one gentleman participated in 64 calls.  A
suggested topic of discussion was given (read by the automated
operator), although participants could chat about whatever they
preferred. The file "topics.tbl" list the topics selected by the
automated operator.

	Each of the 657 participants placed their calls via a
toll-free robot operator maintained by the LDC.  Access to the robot
operator was possible via a unique Personal Identification Number
(PIN) issued by the recruiting staff at the LDC when the caller
enrolled in the project.

	Upon conclusion of the study all calls were audited by LDC
staff members.  Particular attention was paid to PIN verification
(matching speaker with PIN), checking call duration, and call quality.
Upon completion this process checks were issued and mailed to
participants.