DOI: 10.35111/mfxq-tc09
title: GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast News Transcripts Part 1

description: <h3>Introduction</h3><br>
<p>GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast News Transcripts Part 1 was developed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and contains transcriptions of approximately 165 hours of Arabic broadcast news speech collected in 2006 and 2007 by LDC, MediaNet, Tunis, Tunisia and MTC, Rabat, Morocco during Phase 2 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) program.</p><br>
<p>Corresponding audio data is released as GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast News Speech Part 1 (<a href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/catalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2014S07">LDC2014S07</a>).</p><br>
<p>The broadcast recordings used for transcription feature news programs focusing principally on current events from the following sources: Abu Dhabi TV, a television station based in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; Al Alam News Channel, based in Iran; Alhurra, a U.S. government-funded regional broadcaster; Aljazeera, a regional broadcaster located in Doha, Qatar; Dubai TV, a broadcast station in the United Arab Emirates; Al Iraqiyah, an Iraqi television station; Kuwait TV, a national broadcast station in Kuwait; Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation, a Lebanese television station; Nile TV, a broadcast programmer based in Egypt; Saudi TV, a national television station based in Saudi Arabia; and Syria TV, the national television station in Syria.</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 897,868 tokens. The transcripts were created with the LDC-developed transcription tool, XTrans, a multi-platform, multilingual, multi-channel transcription tool that 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/LDC2014T17.txt">sample</a>.</p><br>
<h3>Updates</h3><br>
<p>None at this time.</p><br>
<h3>Acknowledgment</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 © 2007 Abu Dhabi TV, © 2007 Al Alam News Channel, © 2007 Al Iraqiyah, © 2006-2007 Aljazeera, © 2007 Dubai TV, © 2007 Kuwait TV, © 2007 Nile TV, © 2006-2007 PAC Ltd, © 2006 Saudi TV, © 2007 Syria TV, © 2006-2007, 2014 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania