All calls, which lasted up to 30 minutes, originated in North America and were placed to international locations. Most participants called family members or close friends.

This corpus contains speech data files ONLY, along with the minimal amount of documentation needed to describe the contents and format of the speech files and the software packages needed to uncompress the speech data. The transcripts and documentation (LDC96T17) are available separately, as is an associated lexicon (LDC96L16).

Updates

The "shorten" and "sphere" directories have been removed.

The sphere directory contained NIST "SPeech HEader REsources" (SPHERE): C-language source code libraries and utilities for manipulating NIST SPHERE-format waveform files.

The shorten directory contained files for Tony Robinson's "shorten" software for speech compression.

A more recent version of the SPHERE utilities is now available on the NIST web site; additional utilities for converting from SPHERE to other waveform file formats is also available at the LDC web site.

10.10.2003: It has been brought to our attention that 16 sphere files (both from the train and devtest directories) were corrupted; the problem becomes apparent when trying to decompress the files using the w_decode utility. The correct version of these files is now available on a third CD-Rom, containing the 16 speech files and a readme.txt, listing the contents of the disc. If you purchased the corpus, please request the CD by writing to ldc@ldc.upenn.edu. The new orders will receive the two CDs and the third disc with the corrected files.

Content Copyright

Portions © 1996 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania