IARPA Babel Lao Language Pack IARPA-babel203b-v3.1a

<h3>Introduction</h3><br>
<p>IARPA Babel Lao Language Pack IARPA-babel203b-v3.1a was developed by <a href="http://www.appen.com/">Appen</a> for the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) <a href="http://www.iarpa.gov/index.php/research-programs/babel">Babel</a> program. It contains approximately 207 hours of Lao conversational and scripted telephone speech collected in 2013 along with corresponding transcripts.</p><br>
<p>The Babel program focuses on underserved languages and seeks to develop speech recognition technology that can be rapidly applied to any human language to support keyword search performance over large amounts of recorded speech.</p><br>
<h3>Data</h3><br>
<p>The Lao speech in this release represents that spoken in the Vientiane dialect region in Laos. The gender distribution among speakers is approximately equal; speakers' ages range from 16 years to 60 years. Calls were made using different telephones (e.g., mobile, landline) from a variety of environments including the street, a home or office, a public place, and inside a vehicle.</p><br>
<p>Audio data is presented as 8kHz 8-bit a-law encoded audio in sphere format and 48kHz 24-bit PCM encoded audio in wav format. Transcripts are encoded in UTF-8. The romanization scheme was developed by Appen and was based on the scheme developed by the American Library Association and Library of Congress. Further information about transcription methodology is contained in the documentation accompanying this release.</p><br>
<p>Evaluation data is available from <a href="http://www.nist.gov/">NIST</a> in support of <a href="http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/mig/openkws.cfm">OpenKWS</a>.</p><br>
<h3>Samples</h3><br>
<p>Please view this <a href="desc/addenda/LDC2017S08.sph">audio sample</a>, <a href="desc/addenda/LDC2017S08.txt">transcript sample</a>, and <a href="desc/addenda/LDC2017S08.rom.txt">romanized transcript sample</a>.</p><br>
<h3>Updates</h3><br>
<p>None at this time.</p></br>
Portions © 2015 U.S. Government</br>
<br>The U.S. Government acquired this data from Appen Pty Ltd, which assigned the copyright to the data to the U.S. Government.