BBN/AUB DARPA Babylon Levantine Arabic Speech and Transcripts

<h3>Introduction</h3><br>
<p>BBN/AUB DARPA Babylon Levantine Arabic Speech and Transcripts consists of transcribed, spontaneous speech recorded from subjects speaking Levantine colloquial Arabic. Levantine Arabic is the dialect of Arabic spoken in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Palestine. It is significantly different from Modern Standard Arabic. It is a spoken rather than a written language, and&nbsp; includes different words and pronounciations from Modern Standard Arabic.</p><br>
<p>The corpus was developed with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), as part of the Babylon program. The Babylon program was intended to advance the state of the art in speech-to-speech translation systems by creating new technology and by developing systems for field use. BBN was funded under Babylon to develop a limited English/Arabic refugee/medical speech translation system for a handheld computer, and it collected this corpus as part of its work. The corpus may be useful for speech recognition in Levantine colloquial Arabic, including for speech translation and spoken dialog systems.</p><br>
<h3>Samples</h3><br>
<p>To see an example of this corpus, we have provided a <a href="../../../desc/addenda/LDC2005S08.wav" rel="nofollow">audio sample</a> and <a href="../../../desc/addenda/LDC2005S08.gif" rel="nofollow">transcription</a>.</p></br>
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