DOI: 10.35111/ztjc-kx37
title: RT-03 MDE Training Data Text and Annotations

description: <h3>Introduction</h3> <p> MDE RT-03 Training Data Text and Annotations corpus was produced by Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), catalog number LDC2004T12 and ISBN 1-58563-301-1. </p><p> This data was originally created to support the DARPA EARS (Efficient, Affordable, Reusable Speech-to-Text) Program in Metadata Extraction (MDE). The goal of EARS MDE is to enable technology that can take raw Speech-to-Text output and refine it into forms that are of more use to humans and to downstream automatic processes. </p><p>The data in this release consists of English Conversational Telephone Speech (CTS) and Broadcast News (BN) transcripts and annotations. The corresponding speech data is available as <a href="http://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2004S08" rel="nofollow">MDE RT-03 Training Data Speech </a>. </p><h3>Data</h3> <p>There are 633 files, totalling approximately 747 MB with a total of 764,978 tokens. The transcripts and annotations cover approximately 20 hours of Broadcast News and over 40 hours of Conversational Telephone Speech data. The annotated data was originally developed to support the DARPA EARS Metadata Extraction (MDE) Program, and was distributed as training data for the RT-03F evaluation cycle. </p><p>The CTS data was drawn from the <a href="http://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC97S62" rel="nofollow">Switchboard-1 Release 2</a> corpus. </p><p>The BN speech data was drawn from the <a href="http://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC98S71" rel="nofollow">1997 English Broadcast News Speech (HUB4)</a> corpus, from four distinct sources: </p><table> <tr> <td colspan="60%">American Broadcasting Company</td> <td colspan="15%">(ABC)</td> <td colspan="15%">(1998, 2001)</td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="60%">National Broadcasting Company</td> <td colspan="15%">(NBC)</td> <td colspan="15%">(1998, 2001)</td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="60%">Public Radio International</td> <td colspan="15%">(PRI)</td> <td colspan="15%">(1998)</td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="60%">Cable News Network</td> <td colspan="15%">(CNN)</td> <td colspan="15%">(2001)</td> </tr> </table><h3>Annotations</h3> <p> The transcripts within this corpus have been annotated for various kinds of metadata. The goal of MDE is to enable technology that can take raw Speech-To-Text output and refine it into forms that are of more use to humans and to downstream automatic processes. In simple terms, this means the creation of automatic transcripts that are maximally readable. To this end, LDC has defined a SimpleMDE annotation task. Under SimpleMDE, annotators identify four types of fillers: filled pauses like "uh" and "um," discourse markers like "you know," asides and parentheticals, and editing terms like "sorry" and "I mean." Edit disfluencies are also identified; the full extent of the disfluency (or string of adjacent disfluencies) and interruption points are tagged. Annotators further identify SUs (alternately semantic units, sense units, syntactic units, slash units or sentence units); that is, units within the discourse that function to express a complete thought or idea on the part of a speaker. As with disfluency annotation, the goal of SU labeling is to improve transcript readability, here by creating a transcript in which information is presented in small, structured, coherent chunks rather than long turns or stories. There are four types of sentence-level SUs: statements, questions, backchannels and incomplete SUs. To enhance inter-annotator consistency, the annotation task also identifies a number of sub-sentence SU boundaries (coordination and clausal SUs). The <a href="./docs" rel="nofollow">docs</a> directory contains the complete set of SimpleMDE annotation guidelines used to create this data. </p><h3>Data Format</h3> <p>The data appears in two formats. The <a href="http://agtk.sourceforge.net/doc/aglib/2.0/formats.html#ATLAS" rel="nofollow">AG Atlas (ag.xml) format</a> represents the native annotation format, and utilizes the <a href="http://agtk.sf.net/" rel="nofollow">Annotation Graph Library</a>. This data is best explored using the LDC MDE Toolkit, which is freely available at <a href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Projects/MDE/Tools" rel="nofollow">http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Projects/MDE/Tools</a>. </p><p> The data is also provided in <a href="http://www.nist.gov/speech/tests/rt/rt2003/fall/index.htm" rel="nofollow">RTTM format</a> developed by NIST to support the EARS Program. The RTTM format labels each token in the reference transcript according to the properties it displays: lexeme vs. non-lexeme; edit, filler, SU, etc. </p><p>Please click here for a <a href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/desc/addenda/LDC2004T12.rttm" rel="nofollow">RTTM file example</a>. </p><p>General information about the EARS MDE Annotation effort, including free annotation tools, annotation guidelines and additional information can be found at LDC's <a href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Projects/MDE/" rel="nofollow"> EARS MDE Project Page</a>. </p><h3>Updates</h3> <p>There are no updates available at this time. </p> Portions (c) 1998 American Broadcasting Company, Inc., (c) 1997-98 Cable News Network, Inc., (c) 1997 Public Radio International, (c) 1997 National Cable Satellite Corporation, (c) 2004 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania </br>
The World is a co-production of Public Radio International and the British Broadcasting Corporation and is produced at WGBH Boston.