Introduction:

GALE Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Parallel Text - Part 1, Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) catalog number LDC2009T02 and ISBN 1-58563-499-9, contains transcripts and English translations of 20.4 hours of Chinese broadcast conversation 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 Conversation Parallel Text - Part 1, along with other corpora, was used as training data in year 1 (Phase 1) of the DARPA-funded GALE program.

Source Data:

A total of 20.4 hours of Chinese broadcast conversation programming 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 eight different programs.

A manual selection procedure was used to choose data appropriate for the GALE program, namely conversation (talk) 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 LDCs 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 assigned to professional translators for careful translation. Translators followed LDCs 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.

TDF Format:

All final data are in Tab Delimited Format (TDF). TDF is compatible with other transcription formats, such as the 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:

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

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

Content Copyright:

Portions © 2005 China Central TV, © 2005 Phoenix TV, © 2005 - 2007, 2009 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania.