Introduction

GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Parallel Text Part 1 was developed by LDC. Along with other corpora, the parallel text in this release comprised machine translation 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.

Data

GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Parallel Text Part 1 includes 36 source-translation document pairs, comprising 169,109 words of Arabic source text and its English translation. Data is drawn from thirteen distinct Arabic programs broadcast between 2004 and 2007 from the following sources: Al Alam News Channel, a broadcaster located in Iran; Aljazeera, a regional broadcast programmer based in Doha, Qatar; Dubai TV, located in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Oman TV, a national broadcaster located in the Sultanate of Oman; and Radio Sawa, a U.S, government-funded regional broadcaster. Broadcast conversation programming is generally more interactive than traditional news broadcasts and includes talk shows, interviews, call-in programs and roundtable discussions. 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 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 which are included with this release. 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 text files containing one segment of text along with meta information about that segment. Each field in the TDF file is described in TDF_format.txt. All data are encoded in UTF8.

Samples

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.

Updates

None at this time.

Content Copyright

Portions © 2007 Al Alam News Channel, © 2004-2006 Aljazeera, © 2005 Dubai TV, © 2007 Oman TV, © 2004-2007, 2012 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania