GALE Phase 2 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text Part 1

LDC2014T04

Introduction

GALE Phase 2 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text Part 1, Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) catalog number LDC2014T04 and ISBN 1-58563-670-3, was developed by LDC. Along with other corpora, the parallel text in this release comprised training data for Phase 2 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) Program. This corpus contains Chinese source text and corresponding English translations selected from broadcast news (BN) data collected by LDC between 2005 and 2007 and transcribed by LDC or under its direction.

Data

This release includes 30 source-translation document pairs, comprising 198,350 characters of translated material. Data is drawn from 11 distinct Chinese BN programs broadcast by China Central TV, a national and international broadcaster in Mainland China, Jiangsu TV, a regional television station in Mainland China, Jiangsu Province, New Tang Dynasty TV, a broadcaster based in the United States, and Phoenix TV, a Hong-Kong based satellite television station. The broadcast news recordings in this release focus principally on current events.

The data was transcribed by LDC staff and/or transcription vendors under contract to LDC in accordance with Quick Rich Transcription guidelines developed by LDC. Transcribers indicated sentence boundaries in addition to transcribing the text. Data was manually selected for translation according to several criteria, including linguistic features, transcription features and topic features. The transcribed and segmented files were then reformatted into a human-readable translation format and assigned to translation vendors. Translators followed LDC's Chinese to English translation guidelines. Bilingual LDC staff performed quality control procedures on the completed translations.

Source data and translations are distributed in TDF format. TDF files are tab-delimited files containing one segment of text along with meta information about that segment. Each field in the TDF file is described in TDF_format.text. All data are encoded in UTF-8.

Directory Structure

Please see file.tbl for a complete file list as well as checksums for this publication.

data - The data directory contains all of the data for this corpus split into source and translation folders.
docs/ - See the included readme for a further description of the corpus. This directory also contains annotation guidelines, a file table and further documentation.

Updates

Additional information, updates, bug fixes may be available in the LDC catalog entry for this corpus at LDC2014T04.

Sponsorship

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.