IARPA Babel Pashto Language Pack IARPA-babel104b-v0.4bY

<h3>Introduction</h3><br>
<p>IARPA Babel Pashto Language Pack IARPA-babel104b-v0.4bY 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 244 hours of Pashto conversational and scripted telephone speech collected in 2011 and 2012 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 Pashto speech in this release represents that spoken in four dialect regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The gender distribution among speakers is approximately 30% female, 70% male; speakers' ages range from 17 years to 70 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>All audio data is presented as 8kHz 8-bit a-law encoded audio in sphere format. Transcripts are available in two versions: an extended Arabic script and a modified <a href="../../../LDC2004L02">Buckwalter</a> transliteration scheme, both encoded in UTF-8. Further information about transcription methodology is contained in the documentation accompanying this release.</p><br>
<p>Additional 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 the following samples:</p><br>
<ul><br>
<li><a href="desc/addenda/LDC2016S09.sph">Audio Sample</a></li><br>
<li><a href="desc/addenda/LDC2016S09.txt">Transcript Sample</a></li><br>
<li><a href="desc/addenda/LDC2016S09.rom.txt">Romanized Transcript Sample</a></li><br>
</ul><br>
<h3>Updates</h3><br>
<p>None at this time.</p></br>
Portions © 2015 U.S. Government

</br>The U.S. Government acquired this data from Appen Pty Ltd, which assigned the copyright to the data to the U.S. Government.