Introduction

GALE Phase 1 Arabic Broadcast News Parallel Text - Part 2 is the second of the three-part GALE Phase 1 Arabic 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 Arabic Broadcast News Parallel Text - Part 1 was released in 2007.

GALE Phase 1 Arabic Broadcast News Parallel Text - Part 2 contains transcripts and English translations of 10.7 hours of Arabic broadcast news programming selected from various sources. This corpus does not contain the audio files from which the transcripts and translations were generated.

Source Data

A total of 10.7 hours of Arabic broadcast news recordings were selected from four sources and four different programs.

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

Transcription

The selected audio files were carefully transcribed by LDC annotators and professional transcription agencies following LDC's Quick Rich Transcription specification. Manual sentence units/segments (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 were 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 applied to completed translations.

Final Data

TDF Format

All final data are in Tab Delimited Format (TDF). TDF is compatible with other transcription formats, such as Transcriber format and AG format, and it is easy to process.

Each line of a TDF file corresponds to a speech segment and contains 13 tab delimited fields (the 13th field "suType" might be empty):

  
     field           data_type
     -----           ---------
  1  file            unicode
  2  channel         int
  3  start           float 
  4  end             float
  5  speaker         unicode
  6  speakerType     unicode
  7  speakerDialect  unicode
  8  transcript      unicode
  9  section         int
  10 turn            int
  11 segment         int
  12 sectionType     unicode
  13 suType          unicode
  

A source TDF file and its translation are the same except that the transcript in the source TDF is replaced by its English translation.

Encoding

All data are encoded in UTF8.

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 screen captures of the source and translation.

Content Copyright

Portions © 2005 Dubai TV, © 2000 Nile TV, © 2005-2007, 2008 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania