LDC Catalog

GALE Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Parallel Text - Part 2

Item Name:

GALE Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Parallel Text - Part 2

ISBN:

broadcast conversation, transcribed speech

English, Mandarin Chinese

Reduced-License Fee:

US $750.00

Extra-Copy Fee:

N/A

Non-member License:

yes

Online documentation:

yes

Licensing Instructions:

Subscription Members, Standard Members, Non-Members

Citation:

Xiaoyi Ma
2009
GALE Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Parallel Text - Part 2
Linguistic Data Consortium, Philadelphia

Introduction

GALE Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Parallel Text - Part 2, Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) catalog number LDC2009T06 andISBN 1-58563-503-0, contains transcripts and English translations of 24 hours of Chinese broadcast conversation programming from China Central TV (CCTV), Phoenix TV and Voice of America (VOA). It does not contain the audio files from which the transcripts and translations were generated. This release, along with other corpora, was used as training data in Phase 1 (year 1) of the DARPA-funded GALE program. GALE Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Parallel Text - Part 1 was released in January 2009.

Source Data

A total of 24 hours of Chinese broadcast conversation programming was selected from three sources: CCTV (a broadcaster from Mainland China), Phoenix TV (a Hong Kong-based satellite TV station) and VOA. The transcripts and translations represent recordings of seven 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.

Source	Program	Epoch (YYYY.MM)	#hours	#characters
CCTV	Today's Focus	2006.01	2.1	36,398
Phoenix TV	Asian Journal	2005.09 - 2005.11	2.5	27,876
	Behind the Headlines	2006.01	1.5	7,170
	A Date with Lu Yu	2005.10 - 2006.01	10.9	129,782
	News Hacker	2005.10 - 2005.11	3.0	43,070
	Passion on China	2005.10	2.0	21,482
VOA	News08	2005.03	2.0	28,621

Transcription

The selected audio snippets 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 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.

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:

	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 text data:

Content Copyright