Introduction

GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast News Parallel Text 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 news (BN) data collected by LDC between 2005 and 2007 and transcribed by LDC or under its direction.

Data

GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast News Parallel Text includes seven source-translation pairs, comprising 29,210 words of Arabic source text and its English translation. Data is drawn from six distinct Arabic programs broadcast between 2005 and 2007 from Abu Dhabi TV, based in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; Al Alam News Channel, based in Iran; Aljazeera, a regional broadcast programmer based in Doha, Qatar; Dubai TV, based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; and Kuwait TV, a national television station based in Kuwait. The BN programming in this release focuses 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.

Samples

Please follow these links for samples: source, 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.

Updates

None at this time.

Content Copyright

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