DOI: 10.35111/zsbe-6d67
title: Voice of America (VOA) Czech Broadcast News Transcripts

description: <h3>Introduction</h3><br>
<p>Voice of America (VOA) Czech Broadcast News Transcripts was developed by the University of West Bohemia. The transcripts in this release correspond to Voice of America (VOA) Czech Broadcast News Audio (<a href="../../../LDC2000S89">LDC2000S89</a>).</p><br>
<p>Support for this work was provided by the Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic (Grant No. VS97159); by the Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic (Project ME293); and by the NSF Language Engineering Workshop at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD USA (NSF Grant No. IIS-9820687).</p><br>
<h3>Data</h3><br>
<p>Between February 9 and May 28, 1999, the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) collected approximately 30 hours of Czech broadcast audio from the Voice of America news service. The 62 data files presented in this corpus represent the transcripts of the daily broadcasts of 30-minute news programs.</p><br>
<p>The transcriptions were created by native Czech speakers, Pavel Ircing, Jindrich Matousek, Ludek Muller, and Vlasta Radova, working at the Department of Cybernetics, University of West Bohemia in Pilsen under the direction of Josef Psutka. They used transcription software provided by LDC (the "Transcriber" package), developed by Eduoard Geoffrois and Claude Barras at DGA, France, with assistance from Zhibiao Wu at LDC.</p><br>
<p>The version of Transcriber used for this project produced a text file format which is no longer supported by the software; also, the format does not resemble any previous transcription format published by LDC. Therefore, the files in this release have been converted into an SGML format that has been used for other broadcast news transcription corpora, specifcally, the  the "Universal Transcription Format" (UTF -- not to be confused with the "Unicode Transformation Formats") defined by the speech group at NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). A description of that format is provided in the "utf.ps" (Postscript) and "utf.pdf" (Adobe Acrobat) files, and the formal SGML definition is provided in "utf.dtd," all in the release "doc" directory.</p><br>
<p>The transcription text is rendered using the ISO 8859-2 character set. Information relating this character set to the Unicode standard is available at this <a href="http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859.html" rel="nofollow">site</a> and from the <a href="http://www.unicode.org" rel="nofollow">Unicode Consortium</a>.</p><br>
<p>Due to technical limitations in the hardware at LDC that was used to receive the VOA broadcasts via a satellite downlink, a number of files contain brief portions where the audio signal was interrupted. These interruptions typically yielded regions of complete silence that lasted less than two seconds and were scattered sparsely throughout an affected audio file. Additional markup was provided in the transcription texts to isolate the regions where these interruptions occurred.</p><br>
<p>Please click on <a href="desc/addenda/LDC2000T53.txt" rel="nofollow">LDC2000T53.sample</a> to view an example transcript.</p><br>
<h3>Updates</h3><br>
<p>There are no updates at this time.</p></br>
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