MATERIAL Swahili-English Language Pack

<h3>Introduction</h3>
<p>MATERIAL Swahili-English Language Pack, Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) Catalog Number LDC2026S01 was developed by <a href="http://www.appen.com/">Appen</a> for the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) <a href="https://www.iarpa.gov/index.php/research-programs/material">MATERIAL</a> (Machine Translation for English Retrieval of Information in Any Language) program. It contains approximately 112 hours of Swahili conversational telephone speech, transcripts, English translations, annotations and queries.</p>
<p>The MATERIAL program focused on underserved languages with the ultimate goal to build cross language information retrieval systems to find speech and text content using English search queries.</p>
<h3>Data</h3>
<p>The Swahili speech in this release represents that spoken in the Nairobi dialect region of Kenya. The gender distribution among speakers is approximately equal; speakers' ages range from 16 years to 69 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>
<p>Transcripts cover approximately 30% of the speech data, and approximately 3% of the speech data was translated into English. Further information about transcription and translation methodologies is contained in the documentation accompanying this release.</p>
<p>Swahili-English Language Pack also includes domain annotations, English queries and their relevance annotations.</p>
<p>Speech data is presented either as two channel wav or single channel sphere files, predominately in 8kHz A-law format. Some files 48kHz and single channel. All text data is UTF-8 encoded.</p>
<h3>Updates</h3>
<p>No updates at this time.</p>