Description of the Switchboard-2 Phase II telephone speech corpus
_________________________________________________________________

December, 1998


	Project Leader:			David Graff
	
	Programming:			George Zipperlin
					Zhibiao Wu
					Jonathan Wright

	Personnel:			Alexandra Canavan

	Recruiters:			Marcy Bostwick
					Lauren Fetell
					Eric Klein
					David Miller




	This corpus consists of 5 minute telephone conversations from 679
participants 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, newspaper advertisements, and
personal contacts.  The majority of participants resided in the following
states: MN(156), WI(105), OH(70), IA(64), MI(41), IL(37), PA(35), NY(30),
CA(15), MA(12).  The majority of participants in SWB-2 Phase II were
college students from the following universities: Iowa State University,
Michigan State University,  University of Michigan, University of Minnesota,
University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Ohio State University.
	
	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 five calls from phones with different
(ANI) codes.  Participants were asked to discuss a specific topic
(read by the automated operator) and not to provide personal
information during their call.  Some sample topics include:

1. Do you think it should be illegal to burn the American flag?  Should an
individual be punished for this act? What should the punishment be?

2. See how the other caller feels about the proposal that all young
Americans should spend a year or two doing some kind of public service,
such as joining the Peace Corps.

3. Should marijuana be legalized? Why or why not? Do you think it's
appropriate for doctors to prescribe marijuana for medicinal purposes?


	Each of the 679 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 of this process, checks were issued and mailed to
participants.

	Several members of the Switchboard-2 Phase I collection appear in
Phase II as well.  The Personal Identification Numbers (PIN's) of these
individuals are listed below.  Both PIN 1231 and 1904 initiated phone calls
from telephone numbers that they also used in Phase I.  Similarly, this
information can be found below.


Phase I PIN's:

1017
1081
1169
1231
1493
1505
1904
1969


Telephone numbers used in both Phases:

PIN 1231:

215567pqt
215854ppm
215922fsd
215922fsk
215923idt

PIN 1904:

505268wlc
505298hhd