Introduction

GALE Phase 1 Distillation Training, Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) catalog number LDC2007T20 and isbn 1-58563-452-2, constitutes the final release of training data created by LDC for the DARPA GALE Program Phase 1 Distillation technology evaluation. Distillation is one of three primary technology components for the DARPA GALE Program, along with Transcription and Translation. Distillation engines respond to queries from English-speaking users, delivering pertinent, consolidated information in easy-to-understand forms. The distillation engine processes English and foreign language material, both speech and text, from multiple sources and documents, removing redundancy and presenting an integrated response to the user.

This release consists of 248 English, Chinese and/or Arabic queries and their responses, created by LDC annotators. Queries conform to one of ten template types. Query responses may include document and snippet relevance judgments, nuggets, nugs and supernugs. 158 of the 248 queries have been annotated for all features, while the remainder are labeled for only some features. In addition, not all queries have been exhaustively annotated for a given feature, given resource constraints during corpus development. The table below indicates the number of queries that have been labeled for each template in each source language.

Annotation

The annotation task involves responding to a series of user queries. For each query, annotators first find relevant documents and identify snippets (strings of contiguous text that answer the query) in the Arabic, Chinese or English source document. Annotators then create a nugget for each fact expressed in the snippet. Semantically equivalent nuggets are grouped into cross-language, cross-document "supernugs". Judges at BAE Systems finally provide relevance weights for each supernug.

Queries in this release have been annotated for the following tasks:

• searching for relevant documents and providing yes/no judgements
• extracting snippets
• resolution of pronouns, and certain types of temporal and locative expressions contained in the snippets
• creating nuggets, i.e. atomic pieces of information that an annotator considers a valid answer to the query
• building nugs, i.e. clusters of semantically-equivalent nuggets for each language
• building supernugs, i.e. clusters of semantically-equivalent nugs across languages

Samples

For an example of the data contained in this corpus, please review this sample.

Sponsorship

This work was supported in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, GALE Program Grant No. HR0011-06-1-0003. The content of this publication does not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the Government, and no official endorsement should be inferred.

Content Copyright

Portions © 2003 Agence France Presse, © 2000, 2001 American Broadcasting Company, © 2000, 2001, 2003 The Associated Press, © 2000, 2001 Cable News Network, LP, LLLP, © 2003 Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service, Inc., © 2000 National Broadcasting Company, Inc., © 2000, 2001 New York Times, © 2000, 2001 Public Radio International, © 2000 SPH AsiaOne Ltd, © 2003 Ummah Press Service, © 2003 Xinhua News Agency, © 2006, 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.