DOI: 10.35111/4js2-xd38
title: HUB5 Mandarin Telephone Speech and Transcripts Second Edition

description: <h3>Introduction</h3><br>
<p>HUB5 Mandarin Telephone Speech and Transcripts Second Edition was developed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) in support of US government projects for language recognition and Large Vocabulary Conversational Speech Recognition (LVCSR). The first edition was released by LDC in two data sets, HUB5 Mandarin Telephone Speech Corpus (<a href="../../../LDC98S69">LDC98S69</a>) and HUB5 Mandarin Transcripts (<a href="../../../LDC98T26">LDC98T26</a>). This second edition merges the speech and transcript releases, updates the audio format and adds Pinyin transcripts, forced alignment and updated documentation and metadata.</p><br>
<h3>Data</h3><br>
<p>This release consists of (1) approximately 19 hours of Mandarin speech from 42 unscripted telephone conversations between native speakers of Mandarin from CALLFRIEND Mandarin Chinese-Mainland Dialect (<a href="../../../LDC96S55">LDC96S55</a>), which has also been released in a second, updated edition (<a href="../../../LDC2018S09">LDC2018S09</a>) and (2) associated transcripts of contiguous 5-30 minute segments from those telephone conversations.</p><br>
<p>Audio data was collected before July 1997. Participants could speak with a person of their choice on any topic; most called family members and friends. All calls originated in North America. The recorded conversations lasted up to 30 minutes.</p><br>
<p>The audio data was recorded as 8kHz u-law SPH encoded stereo files with one end of the phone call on each channel. In this release, files were converted to WAV format, and information from the original SPH headers is included with the corpus. SPH files are not included in this second edition.</p><br>
<p>Completed calls passed through two human audits. The first audit was conducted to verify that the target language was spoken by the participants and to check the quality of the recordings. The second audit was conducted by a native speaker familiar with Mainland and Taiwan Mandarin dialects to classify the conversations under one of the two categories. Audit information is available in <a href="docs/callinfo.txt">i</a>n the corpus documentation.</p><br>
<p>Transcripts were created manually by native Mandarin speakers in the GB2312 encoding schema. This release adds Pinyin translations of the transcripts in UTF-8 and includes the original transcripts converted to UTF-8. For forced alignment, files were converted to linear-PCM encoding, and the speaker channels were split into separate files to avoid overlapping. The aligned files are presented in tab-separated files and in TextGrid files. Alignment data is provided in UTF-8.</p><br>
<h3>Samples</h3><br>
<p>Please view the following samples:</p><br>
<ul><br>
<li><a href="desc/addenda/LDC2018S18.wav">Audio</a></li><br>
<li><a href="desc/addenda/LDC2018S18.txt">Transcript</a></li><br>
<li><a href="desc/addenda/LDC2018S18.py.txt">Pinyin Transcript</a></li><br>
<li><a href="desc/addenda/LDC2018S18.ali.txt">Tab-Seperated Alignment</a></li><br>
<li><a href="desc/addenda/LDC2018S18.phm.TextGrid">Phoneme TextGrid</a></li><br>
<li><a href="desc/addenda/LDC2018S18.wrd.TextGrid">Word TextGrid</a></li><br>
</ul><br>
<h3>Updates</h3><br>
<p>None at this time.</p></br>
Portions © 1996, 1998, 2018 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania