Introduction

GALE Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text - Part 2 contains transcripts and English translations of 21.9 hours of Chinese broadcast news programming from China Central TV (CCTV) and Phoenix TV. It does not contain the audio files from which the transcripts and translations were generated. GALE Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text - Part 2 is the second of the three-part GALE Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text, which, along with other corpora, was used as training data in year 1 (Phase 1) of the DARPA-funded GALE program. GALE Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text - Part 1 was published in 2007.

Source Data

A total of 21.9 hours of Chinese broadcast news recordings were selected from two sources, CCTV (a broadcaster from Mainland China) and Phoenix TV (a Hong Kong based satellite TV station). The transcripts and translations represent recordings of four different programs.

A manual selection procedure was used to choose data appropriate for the GALE program, namely, news programs focusing on current events. Stories on topics such as sports, entertainment and business were excluded from the data set. The following table is a summary of the files included in this release.

Transcription

The selected audio snippets were carefully transcribed by LDC annotators and professional transcription agencies following LDC's Quick Rich Transcription specification. Manual sentence unit/segment (SU) annotation was also performed as part of the transcription task. Three types of end of sentence SU are identified:

- statement SU
- question SU
- incomplete SU

Translation

After transcription and SU annotation, files were reformatted into a human-readable translation format and assigned to professional translators for careful translation. Translators followed LDC's GALE Translation guidelines, which describe the makeup of the translation team, the source data format, the translation data format, best practices for translating certain linguistic features (such as names and speech disfluencies) and quality control procedures for completed translations.

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.

Samples

For an example of the data in this corpus, please examine these sample images of a source and translation.

Content Copyright

Portions © 2004, 2005 China Central TV, © 2005 Phoenix TV, © 2005 - 2007, 2008 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania