Introduction

2003 NIST Rich Transcription Evaluation Data contains the test material used in the 2003 Rich Transcription Spring and Fall evaluations administered by the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) Speech Group. The Spring evaluation (RT-03S), implemented in March-April 2003, focused on Speech-To-Text (STT) tasks for broadcast news speech and conversational telephone speech in three languages: English, Mandarin Chinese and Arabic. That evaluation also included one Metadata Extraction (MDE) task, speaker diarization for broadcast news speech and conversational telephone speech in English. The Fall evaluation (RT-03F), implemented in October 2003, focused on MDE tasks including speaker diarization, speaker-attributed STT, SU (sentence/semantic unit) detection and disfluency detection for broadcast news speech and conversational telephone speech in English. For complete information about the evaluations, see the RT-03 Spring Evaluation Website and the RT-03 Fall Evaluation Website.

Data

The BN datasets were selected from TDT-4 sources collected in February 2001. The evaluation excerpts were transcribed to the nearest story boundary. The English BN dataset is approximately three hours long and is composed of 30-minute excerpts from six different broadcasts. The Mandarin Chinese BN dataset is approximately one hour long, consisting of 12-minute excerpts from five different broadcasts. The Arabic BN dataset is also approximately one hour long and contains 30-minute excerpts from two different broadcasts.

The CTS datasets consist of material from various LDC telephone speech data. All evaluation excerpts were transcribed to the nearest turn. The English CTS set is approximately 6 hours long and is composed of 5-minute excerpts from 72 different conversations: 36 from the Switchboard Cellular collection and 36 from the Fisher collection. The Mandarin Chinese CTS dataset is approximately one hour long and consists of 5-minute excerpts from 12 different conversations from the CallFriend Mandarin Chinese data. The Arabic CTS set is also approximately one hour long and contains 5-minute excerpts from 12 different conversations from the CallHome Egyptian Arabic data.

No manual (human-annotated) segmentations were provided. Sites were required to generate their own segmentations automatically.

Unlike the BN audio files where the full broadcasts were provided, the CTS audio files contain only the evaluation excerpts. Each audio excerpt is a SPHERE-headered, two channel interleaved 8-bit mulaw file.

Samples

• English Broacast News Audio
• Indices
• Transcriptions

Content Copyright

Portions © 2001 American Broadcasting Company, © 2001 Cable News Network, LP, LLLP, © 2001 China Broadcasting System (Taiwan), © 2001 China Central TV, © 2001 China National Radio, © 2001 China Television System (Taiwan), © 2001 National Broadcasting Company, © 2001 Nile TV, © 2001 Public Radio International, © 1996-2005, 2007 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.