Introduction

GALE Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text - Part 3 contains transcripts and English translations of 19.1 hours of Chinese broadcast news programming from Voice of America (VOA), China Central TV (CCTV) and Phoenix TV. GALE Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text - Part 3 is the last of the three-part GALE Phase 1 Chinese 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. LDC has previously released GALE Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text - Part 1 and GALE Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text - Part 2.

Source Data

A total of 19.1 hours of Chinese broadcast news recordings were selected from three sources: VOA, CCTV (a broadcaster from Mainland China) and Phoenix TV (a Hong Kong-based satellite TV station). The transcripts and translations represent recordings of five different programs.

A manual selection procedure was used to choose data appropriate for the GALE program, namely, news 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.

The VOA files are named mv970520c.tdf and mv970618a.tdf. The corresponding speech data for the VOA data can be found in 1997 Mandarin Broadcast News Speech (HUB4-NE), LDC98S73. The corresponding speech files for the CCTV and Phoenix TV data have not been released.

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.

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, 2006 China Central TV, © 2005, 2006 Phoenix TV, © 2005-2007, 2008 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania