Introduction

The goal of the NIST Language Recognition Evaluation (LRE) is to establish the baseline of current performance capability for language recognition of conversational telephone speech and to lay the groundwork for further research efforts in the field. The series had its first evaluation in 1996. 2003 NIST Language Recognition Evaluation (LRE-03) was part of this ongoing series of evaluations of language recognition technology.

Further information regarding this evaluation may be found on the 2003 NIST Language Recognition Evaluation website and in the NIST 2003 evaluation plan.

The task evaluated was the detection of a given target language. Given a test segment of speech, a target language was assigned as a test hypothesis, and the task was to determine whether this test hypothesis was true or false.

Data

Each speech file is one side of a "four wire" telephone conversation represented as 8-bit, 8kHz mulaw data. There are 11,839 speech files in sphere(.sph) format for a total of around forty six hours of speech. The speech data was compiled from the LDC's CALLFRIEND, CALLHOME, and Switchboard-2 corpora. Each file contains one test segment. The test segments are divided into three-second, ten-second, and thirty-second tests, each in its own directory.

Samples

For an example of the data in this corpus, please listen to this audio sample.

Content Copyright

Portions © 1996-2002, 2006 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania