Introduction

This release is Part 1 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. This corpus contains transcripts and English translations of 17 hours of Arabic broadcast news programming selected from a variety of sources.

This corpus does not contain the audio files from which the transcripts and translations were generated. The audio files will be released by the LDC at a future date.

Source Data

A total of 17 hours of Arabic broadcast news recordings was selected from six sources and seven 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 snippets were then carefully transcribed by LDC annotators and professional transcription agencies following LDC's Quick Rich Transcription. 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, the files were reformatted into a human-readable translation format and were then 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 (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.

Samples

For examples of this data, please examine these screen captures of the original text and its 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.

Content Copyright

Portions © 2005 Dubai TV, © 2000 Nile TV, © 2005 PAC, Ltd., © 2005-2007 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania