VAST Chinese Speech and Transcripts

<h3>Introduction</h3><br>
<p>VAST Chinese Speech and Transcripts was developed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) for the VAST (Video Annotation for Speech Technologies) project and is comprised of approximately 29 hours of Mandarin Chinese audio extracted from amateur video content harvested from the web and corresponding time-aligned transcripts.</p><br>
<p>The aim of the <a href="https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/sites/www.ldc.upenn.edu/files/lrec2018-vast.pdf">VAST</a> project was to collect and annotate data in several languages to support the development of speech technologies such as speech activity detection, language identification, speaker identification, and speech recognition. The collection was designed to ensure that the audio covered a wide range of speakers, communication domains, noise environments, and data sources. The data included in this corpus comprises the subset of files selected for transcription from the larger pool of Chinese data collected during the project.</p><br>
<h3>Data</h3><br>
<p>The files in this corpus were transcribed by LDC staff and/or by transcription vendors under contract to LDC using <a href="https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/language-resources/tools/xtrans">XTrans</a>, which supports manual transcription across multiple channels, languages and platforms. Transcribers followed a Quick-Rich Transcription style; transcription guidelines are included in this release. A targeted second pass was made to check for various errors, to correct use of transcription conventions, and to add marking for proper names.</p><br>
<p>The audio data is presented as 16kHz 16-bit flac compressed files (.flac). When uncompressed, the audio files are in PCM MS-WAV format. Transcripts are UTF-8 encoded plain text files in tdf format.</p><br>
<h3>Samples</h3><br>
<p>Please view this <a href="desc/addenda/LDC2019S05.flac">audio sample</a> and <a href="desc/addenda/LDC2019S05.tdf">transcript sample</a>.</p><br>
<h3>Updates</h3><br>
<p>None at this time.</p></br>
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