DOI: 10.35111/6qh2-yv69
title: GALE Phase 4 Arabic Broadcast News Transcripts

description: <h3>Introduction</h3><br>
<p>GALE Phase 4 Arabic Broadcast News Transcripts was developed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and contains transcriptions of approximately 37 hours of Arabic broadcast news speech collected in 2008 and 2009 by the Linguistic Data Consortium (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 News Speech (<a href="../../../LDC2018S05">LDC2018S05</a>).</p><br>
<p>The recordings for transcription feature news broadcasts focusing principally on current events from the following sources: Abu Dhabi TV, a television station based in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; Al Arabiya, a news television station based in Dubai; Al Baghdadya , an Iraqi broadcast programmer; Alhurra, a U.S. government-funded regional broadcaster; Al Iraqiyah, an Iraqi television station; Aljazeera, a regional broadcaster located in Doha, Qatar; Al Ordiniyah, a national broadcast station in Jordan; Kuwait TV, a national broadcast station based in Kuwait; Radio Sawa, a U.S. government-funded regional broadcaster; Saudi TV, a national television station based in Saudi Arabia; Syria TV, the national television station in Syria; and Yemen TV, a television station based in Yemen.</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 204,735 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/downloads">https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/language-resources/tools/xtrans/downloads</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/LDC2018T14.txt">transcript 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 © 2009 Abu Dhabi TV, © 2009 Al Arabiya, © 2008 Al Baghdadya, © 2008 Al Iraqiyah, © 2008 Aljazeera, © 2008 Al Ordiniyah, © 2008 Kuwait TV, © 2008 Saudi TV, © 2008 Syria TV, © 2008 Yemen TV, © 2008, 2009, 2018 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania