DOI: 10.35111/adse-qz03
title: Fisher Levantine Arabic Conversational Telephone Speech, Transcripts

description: <h3>Introduction</h3><br>
<p>Levantine Arabic is spoken along the western Mediterranean coast from Anatolia to the Sinai Peninsula and encompasses the local dialects of Lebanon, Syria and Palestine. There are two distinct varieties: Northern, centered around Syria and Lebanon and Southern, spoken in Jordan and Palestine. Northern Levantine Arabic speakers include approximately 8.8 million speakers in Syria and 6 million speakers in Lebanon. Southern Levantine Arabic speakers include approximately 3.5 million speakers in Jordan, 1.6 million speakers in Palestine and nearly one million speakers in Israel.</p><br>
<p>Fisher Levantine Arabic Conversational Telephone Speech, Transcripts contains transcripts for 279 telephone conversations. The majority of the speakers are from Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine. The corresponding telephone speech is contained in <a href="http://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2007S02" rel="nofollow">Fisher Levantine Arabic Conversational Telephone Speech</a>.</p><br>
<table border="1"><br>
<tbody><br>
<tr><br>
<td colspan="2">Speaker Distribution by Region</td><br>
</tr><br>
<tr><br>
<td>Jordan</td><br>
<td>60%</td><br>
</tr><br>
<tr><br>
<td>Palestine</td><br>
<td>15%</td><br>
</tr><br>
<tr><br>
<td>Lebanon</td><br>
<td>15%</td><br>
</tr><br>
<tr><br>
<td>Syria</td><br>
<td>8%</td><br>
</tr><br>
<tr><br>
<td>other</td><br>
<td>2%</td><br>
</tr><br>
</tbody><br>
</table><br>
<p> </p><br>
<p>The Fisher telephone conversation collection protocol was created at LDC to address a critical need of developers trying to build robust automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Previous collection protocols, such as CALLFRIEND and Switchboard-II and the resulting corpora, have been adapted for ASR research but were in fact developed for language and speaker identification respectively. Although the CALLHOME protocol and corpora were developed to support ASR technology, they feature small numbers of speakers making telephone calls of relatively long duration with narrow vocabulary across the collection. CALLHOME conversations are challengingly natural and intimate. Under the Fisher protocol, a very large number of participants each make a few calls of short duration speaking to other participants, whom they typically do not know, about assigned topics. This maximizes inter-speaker variation and vocabulary breadth although it also increases formality.</p><br>
<p>Previous protocols such as CALLHOME, CALLFRIEND and Switchboard relied upon participant activity to drive the collection. Fisher is unique in being platform driven rather than participant driven. Participants who wish to initiate a call may do so however the collection platform initiates the majority of calls. Participants need only answer their phones at the times they specified when registering for the study.</p><br>
<p>To encourage a broad range of vocabulary, Fisher participants are asked to speak on an assigned topic which is selected at random from a list, which changes every 24 hours and which is assigned to all subjects paired on that day. Some topics are inherited or refined from previous Switchboard studies while others were developed specifically for the Fisher protocol.</p><br>
<h3>Data</h3><br>
<p>The transcripts were created with green and yellow layers using LDC's Multi-Dialectal Transcription Tool (AMADAT). The green layer seeks to anchor dialectal forms to similar or related Modern Standard Arabic orothgraphy-based forms. The yellow layer is a more careful and detailed transcription that adds functionally necessary vowels and marks important sociolinguistic variations and morphophonemic features.</p><br>
<p>The green-layer transcripts in this corpus are a subset of the transcripts contained in <a href="http://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2006T07" rel="nofollow">Levantine Arabic QT Training Data Set 5, Transcripts, LDC2006T07</a>. The yellow-layer transcription was added in this release.</p><br>
<h3>Samples</h3><br>
<p>For an example of the text contained in this corpus, please view this <a href="desc/addenda/LDC2007T04.jpg" rel="nofollow">image of the transcriptions</a> (jpeg format).</p></br>
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