Introduction

GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Parallel Text Part 2 was developed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC). Along with other corpora, the parallel text in this release comprised training data for Phase 2 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) Program. This corpus contains Modern Standard Arabic source text and corresponding English translations selected from broadcast conversation (BC) data collected by LDC between 2004 and 2007 and transcribed by LDC or under its direction. GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Parallel Text Part 1 LDC2012T06 was released in May 2012.

Data

GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Parallel Text Part 2 includes 29 source-translation document pairs, comprising 169,488 words of Arabic source text and its English translation. Data is drawn from eight distinct Arabic programs broadcast between 2004 and 2007 from Aljazeera, a regional broadcast programmer based in Doha, Qatar; and Nile TV, an Egyptian broadcaster. Broadcast conversation programming is generally more interactive than traditional news broadcasts and includes talk shows, interviews, call-in programs and roundtables. The programs in this release focus on current events topics.

The files in this release were transcribed by LDC staff and/or transcription vendors under contract to LDC in accordance with the Quick Rich Transcription guidelines developed by LDC. Transcribers indicated sentence boundaries in addition to transcribing the text. Data was manually selected for translation according to several criteria, including linguistic features, transcription features and topic features. The transcribed and segmented files were then reformatted into a human-readable translation format and assigned to translation vendors. Translators followed LDC's Arabic to English translation guidelines. Bilingual LDC staff performed quality control procedures on the completed translations.

Source data and translations are distributed in TDF format. TDF files are tab-delimited files containing one segment of text along with meta information about that segment. Each field in the TDF file is described in TDF_format.text. All data are encoded in UTF-8.

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 © 2004-2006 Aljazeera, © 2007 Nile TV, © 2004-2007, 2012 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania