Introduction

This file contains documentation about the TDT4 Multilingual Broadcast News Speech Corpus; Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) catalog number LDC2005S11, ISBN number 1-58563-338-0.

This corpus was created by Linguistic Data Consortium with support from the DARPA TIDES (Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization) Program. This release contains the complete set of American English, Modern Standard Arabic and Mandarin Chinese broadcast news audio used in the 2002 and 2003 Topic Detection and Tracking technology evaluations. The transcripts corresponding to the audio contained in this release, along with newswire data and topic relevance annotations, can be found in LDC Publication LDC2005T16, TDT4 Multilingual Text and Annotations.

Topic Detection and Tracking (TDT) refers to automatic techniques for finding topically related material in streams of data such as newswire and broadcast news. Evaluation tasks in 2002 and 2003 included the segmentation of a news source into stories, the tracking of known topics, the detection of unknown topics, the detection of initial stories on unknown topics, and the detection of pairs of stories on the same topic. Complete documentation on the TDT evaluation program can be found on NIST's TDT website.

For further information about corpora and annotations to support the TDT Program visit LDC's TDT information pages.

Samples

Please examine these wave files for an example of this corpus.

• Arabic
• English
• Mandarin

Updates

The initial July 2005 release contained an error in which a small number of files were misnamed. This error has been corrected. Customers who recevied the original should have also received the correction. If you ordered this publication before Nov. 1, 2005 and have not received a correction, please contact the LDC Membership Coordinator at ldc@ldc.upenn.edu

Content Copyright

Portions © 2000-2001: Xinhua News Agency, Agence France-Presse, New York Times, Associated Press Newswire, Zaobao, An-Nahar, Al-Hayat, Nile TV, Voice of America, Public Radio International, Cable News Network, American Broadcasting Corporation, National Broadcasting Company, China National Radio, China Television System, China Central TV, China Broadcasting System, © 2000-2001, 2005 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania

The World is a co-production of Public Radio International and the British Broadcasting Corporation and is produced at WGBH Boston.