DOI: 10.35111/3fke-7p97
title: Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English Part III

description: <p>Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English Part III was produced by Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) catalog number LDC2004S10 and ISBN 1-58563-308-9.</p><br>
<p>Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English Part III is based on hundreds of recordings of natural speech from all over the United States, representing a wide variety of people of different regional origins, ages, occupations, and ethnic and social backgrounds. It reflects many ways that people use language in their lives: conversation, gossip, arguments, on-the-job talk, card games, city council meetings, sales pitches, classroom lectures, political speeches, bedtime stories, sermons, weddings, and more.</p><br>
<p>The corpus was collected by: University of California, Santa Barbara Center for the Study of Discourse (Director: John W. Du Bois (UCSB), Authors: John W. Du Bois and Robert Englebretson. Associate Editors: Wallace L. Chafe (UCSB), Charles Meyer (UMass, Boston), and Sandra A. Thompson (UCSB)).</p><br>
<p>Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English Part III is also part of the International Corpus of English (ICE) (Charles W. Meyer, Director), representing the American Component.</p><br>
<p>For software and additional data resources, please refer to the following sites: <a href="http://talkbank.org/" rel="nofollow">Talkbank</a>, <a href="http://ice-corpora.net/ice/index.html">International Corpus of English</a>.</p><br>
<p>Part I of the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English is available as <a href="http://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2000S85" rel="nofollow">LDC2000S85</a>.</p><br>
<p>Part II of the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English is available as <a href="http://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2003S06" rel="nofollow">LDC2003S06</a>.</p><br>
<h3>Data</h3><br>
<p>The audio data consists of 16 wave format speech files, recorded in two-channel pcm, at 22050Hz. The speech files total ~6 hours of audio (1.8GB), representing over 116K-words and over 9K unique words in transcription.</p><br>
<table><br>
<tbody><br>
<tr><br>
<td colspan="40%"><a href="docs/LDC2004S10/segment.txt" rel="nofollow">segment.txt</a></td><br>
<td colspan="60%">explanation of the information in segment.tbl</td><br>
</tr><br>
<tr><br>
<td colspan="40%"><a href="docs/LDC2004S10/segment.tbl" rel="nofollow">segment.tbl</a></td><br>
<td colspan="60%">collection information about the recordings</td><br>
</tr><br>
<tr><br>
<td colspan="40%"><a href="docs/LDC2004S10/segment_summaries.txt" rel="nofollow">segment_summaries.txt</a></td><br>
<td colspan="60%">brief summaries of audio scenarios</td><br>
</tr><br>
<tr><br>
<td colspan="40%"><a href="docs/LDC2004S10/speaker.txt" rel="nofollow">speaker.txt</a></td><br>
<td colspan="60%">explanation of the information in speaker.tbl</td><br>
</tr><br>
<tr><br>
<td colspan="40%"><a href="docs/LDC2004S10/speaker.tbl" rel="nofollow">speaker.tbl</a></td><br>
<td colspan="60%">speaker ethnographic, demographic information</td><br>
</tr><br>
<tr><br>
<td colspan="40%"><a href="docs/LDC2004S10/table.txt" rel="nofollow">table.txt</a></td><br>
<td colspan="60%">description of file names and informal titles</td><br>
</tr><br>
<tr><br>
<td colspan="40%"><a href="docs/LDC2004S10/annotations.txt" rel="nofollow">annotations.txt</a></td><br>
<td colspan="60%">list of conventions and prosodic annotations</td><br>
</tr><br>
</tbody><br>
</table><br>
<p>The the transcripts are in the following format:</p><br>
<p><strong>.trn format structure</strong> 2.660 2.805 JOANNE: But, 2.805 4.685 so these slides be real interesting. 6.140 6.325 KEN: ... Yeah. 6.325 7.710 I think it'll be real interesting</p><br>
<p>A sample transcript file may be found <a href="desc/addenda/LDC2004S10.trn" rel="nofollow">here</a>.</p><br>
<p>Personal names, place names, phone numbers, etc., in the transcripts have been altered to preserve the anonymity of the speakers and their acquaintances and the audio files have been filtered to make these portions of the recordings unrecognizable. Pitch information is still recoverable from these filtered portions of the recordings, but the amplitude levels in these regions have been reduced relative to the original signal. A separate filter list file (*.flt) associated with each transcript/waveform file pair is provided to list the beginning and ending times of the filtered regions. The file sbc040.flt is empty indicating there was no personal information to filter out.</p><br>
<p>The filtering was done using a digital FIR low-pass filter, with the cut-off frequency set at 400 Hz. The effect of the filter was gradually faded in and out at the beginning and end of the regions over a 1,000 sample region, roughly 45 milliseconds, to avoid abrupt transitions in the resulting waveform.</p><br>
<p>For a complete listing of the files, please see <a href="docs/LDC2004S10/file.tbl" rel="nofollow">file.tbl</a> in the <a href="docs/LDC2004S10/" rel="nofollow">docs</a> directory.</p><br>
<h3>Acknowledgements</h3><br>
<p>The completion and release of this corpus was facilitated by funding extended by the Talkbank project. Talkbank is an interdisciplinary research project funded by a five-year grant (BCS-998009, KDI, SBE) from the National Science Foundation to Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pennsylvania.</p><br>
<p>Produced at the LDC by Nii Martey.</p><br>
<h3>Updates</h3><br>
<p>Additional information, updates, bug fixes may be available in the LDC catalog entry for this corpus at <a href="http://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2003S06" rel="nofollow">LDC2003S06</a>.</p></br>
Portions © 2003 University of California, © 2003 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania