Introduction

This corpus was created by Linguistic Data Consortium to provide training data for the RT-04 Fall Metadata Extraction (MDE) Evaluation, part of the DARPA EARS (Efficient, Affordable, Reusable Speech-to-Text) Program. This data set has been created and distributed by Linguistic Data Consortium. This data was previously released to the EARS MDE community as LDC2004E31.

The goal of MDE is to enable technology that can take raw Speech-to-Text output and refine it into forms that are of more use to humans and to downstream automatic processes. In simple terms, this means the creation of automatic transcripts that are maximally readable. This readability might be achieved in a number of ways: flagging non-content words like filled pauses and discourse markers for optional removal; marking sections of disfluent speech; and creating boundaries between natural breakpoints in the flow of speech so that each sentence or other meaningful unit of speech might be presented on a separate line within the resulting transcript. Natural capitalization, punctuation and standardized spelling, plus sensible conventions for representing speaker turns and identity are further elements in the readable transcript. LDC has defined a SimpleMDE annotation task specification and has annotated English telephone and broadcast news data to provide training data for MDE.

In this release, some original annotations contained in LDC2004E31 have been re-mapped to new MDE elements to support better annotation consistency. In particular, the mapping affects Discourse Responses (DR), Discourse Markers (DM) and Backchannel SUs (BC). A description of the original mapping proposed by ICSI appears in 3) below, with complete documentation of the mapping rules contained in the docs/drmap-discussion directory. The scripts used to apply the mapping can be found in the docs/scripts/drmap directory.

Samples

For an example of this corpus, please review the following xml samples.

• Broadcast News Annotations
• Telephone Conversation Annotation

Content Copyright

Portions © 2004 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania,© 2003 American Broadcasting Company,© 2003 National Broadcasting Company,© 2003 Public Radio International,© 2003 Cable News Network, Inc. All Rights Reserved,© 2003 National Cable Satellite Corporation

The World is a co-production of Public Radio International and the British Broadcasting Corporation and is produced at WGBH Boston.