DOI: 10.35111/28sn-jx76
title: GALE Phase 4 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Transcripts

description: <h3>Introduction</h3><br>
<p>GALE Phase 4 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Transcripts was developed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and contains transcriptions of approximately 75 hours of Arabic broadcast conversation speech collected in 2008 and 2009 by LDC, MediaNet, Tunis, Tunisia and MTC, Rabat, Morocco during Phase 4 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) program.</p><br>
<p>Corresponding audio data is released as GALE Phase 4 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Speech (<a href="../../../LDC2017S15">LDC2017S15</a>).</p><br>
<p>The broadcast conversation recordings feature interviews, call-in programs and roundtable discussions focusing principally on current events from the following sources: Al Alam News Channel, based in Iran; Al Fayhaa, an Iraqi television channel; Al Hiwar, a regional broadcast station based in the United Kingdom; Alnurra, a U.S. government-funded regional broadcaster; Aljazeera, a regional broadcaster located in Doha, Qatar; Al Ordiniyah, a national broadcast station in Jordan; Dubai TV, a broadcast station in the United Arab Emirates; Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation, a Lebanese television station; Saudi TV, a national television station based in Saudi Arabia; Syria TV, the national television station in Syria; and Tunisian National TV, a national television station in Tunisia.</p><br>
<h3>Data</h3><br>
<p>The transcript files are in plain-text, tab-delimited format (TDF) with UTF-8 encoding, and the transcribed data totals 475,211 tokens. The transcripts were created with the LDC tool XTrans, which supports manual transcription and annotation of audio recordings. XTrans is available from the following link, <a href="https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/language-resources/tools/xtrans">https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/language-resources/tools/xtrans</a>.</p><br>
<p>The files in this corpus were transcribed by LDC staff and/or by transcription vendors under contract to LDC. Transcribers followed LDC's quick transcription guidelines (QTR) and quick rich transcription specification (QRTR) both of which are included in the documentation with this release. QTR transcription consists of quick (near-) verbatim, time-aligned transcripts plus speaker identification with minimal additional mark-up. It does not include sentence unit annotation. QRTR annotation adds structural information such as topic boundaries and manual sentence unit annotation to the core components of a quick transcript. Files with QTR as part of the filename were developed using QTR transcription. Files with QRTR in the filename indicate QRTR transcription.</p><br>
<h3>Samples</h3><br>
<p>Please view this <a href="desc/addenda/LDC2017T12.txt">sample</a>.</p><br>
<h3>Updates</h3><br>
<p>None at this time.</p><br>
<h3>Acknowledgement</h3><br>
<p>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.</p></br>
Portions © 2008 Al Alam News Channel, © 2008-2009 Al Fayaa, © 2008-2009 Al Hiwar, © 2008 Aljazeera, © 2008-2009 Al Ordiniyah, © 2008-2009 Dubai TV, © 2008 PAC Ltd, © 2008-2009 Saudi TV, © 2008 Syria TV, © 2008-2009 Tunisian National TV, © 2008, 2009, 2017 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania