DOI: 10.35111/8d6h-pq54
title: GALE Phase 4 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Speech

description: <h3>Introduction</h3><br>
<p>GALE Phase 4 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Speech was developed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and is comprised of approximately 172 hours of Mandarin Chinese broadcast conversation speech collected in 2008 by LDC and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong, during Phase 4 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) Program.</p><br>
<p>Corresponding transcripts are released as GALE Phase 4 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Transcripts (<a href="http://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2016T12">LDC2016T12</a>).</p><br>
<p>Broadcast audio for the GALE program was collected at LDC&rsquo;s Philadelphia, PA USA facilities and at three remote collection sites: HKUST (Chinese), Medianet (Tunis, Tunisia) (Arabic), and MTC (Rabat, Morocco) (Arabic). The combined local and outsourced broadcast collection supported GALE at a rate of approximately 300 hours per week of programming from more than 50 broadcast sources for a total of over 30,000 hours of collected broadcast audio over the life of the program.</p><br>
<p>LDC&rsquo;s local <a href="https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/about/facilities/broadcast-collection"> broadcast collection system</a> is highly automated, easily extensible and robust and capable of collecting, processing and evaluating hundreds of hours of content from several dozen sources per day. The broadcast material is served to the system by a set of free-to-air (FTA) satellite receivers, commercial direct satellite systems (DSS) such as DirecTV, direct broadcast satellite (DBS) receivers, and cable television (CATV) feeds. The mapping between receivers and recorders is dynamic and modular. All signal routing is performed under computer control, using a 256x64 A/V matrix switch. Programs are recorded in a high bandwidth A/V format and are then processed to extract audio, to generate keyframes and compressed audio/video, to produce time-synchronized closed captions (in the case of North American English) and to generate automatic speech recognition (ASR) output. An overview of the system, the sources recorded and the configuration of the recording laboratory are contained in the Guidelines for Broadcast Audio Collection Version 3.0 included in this release.</p><br>
<p>LDC designed a portable platform for remote broadcast collection. This is a TiVO-style digital video recording (DVR) system that records two streams of A/V material simultaneously. It supports analog CATV (NTSC and PAL) and FTA DVB-S satellite programming and can operate outside of the United States. It has a small footprint, weighs less than 30 pounds and can be transported as carry-on luggage.</p><br>
<p>HKUST collected Chinese broadcast programming using its internal recording system and a portable broadcast collection platform designed by LDC and installed at HKUST in 2006.</p><br>
<h3>Data</h3><br>
<p>The broadcast conversation recordings in this release feature interviews, call-in programs and roundtable discussions focusing principally on current events from the following sources: Beijing TV, a national television station in Mainland China; China Central TV (CCTV), a national and international broadcaster in Mainland China; Hubei TV, a regional television station in Mainland China, Hubei Province; Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong-based satellite television station ; and Voice of America (VOA), a U.S. government-funded broadcast programmer.</p><br>
<p>This release contains 236 audio files presented in <a href="http://flac.sourceforge.net">FLAC</a>-compressed Waveform Audio File format (.flac), 16000 Hz single-channel 16-bit PCM. Each file was audited by a native Chinese speaker following Audit Procedure Specification Version 2.0 which is included in this release. The broadcast auditing process served three principal goals: as a check on the operation of the broadcast collection system equipment by identifying failed, incomplete or faulty recordings; as an indicator of broadcast schedule changes by identifying instances when the incorrect program was recorded; and as a guide for data selection by retaining information about a program&rsquo;s genre, data type and topic.</p><br>
<h3>Samples</h3><br>
<p>Please listen to this <a href="desc/addenda/LDC2016S03.wav">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 © 2008 Beijing TV, China Central TV, Hubei TV, Phoenix TV, © 2008, 2011, 2016 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania