MATERIAL Somali-English Language Pack

<h3>Introduction</h3>
<p>MATERIAL Somali-English Language Pack was developed by <a href="http://www.appen.com/">Appen</a>&nbsp;for the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity)&nbsp;<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 80 hours of Somali 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 Somali speech in this release represents that spoken in the Northern and Benaadir dialect regions of Somalia. 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>
<p>Transcripts cover approximately 10% of the speech data, and approximately 4% 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>Somali-English Language Pack also includes domain annotations, English queries and their relevance annotations. Annotators marked transcripts by domain (e.g., lifestyle, business-and-commerce, sports, education, and so on), by query (simple, conceptual, hybrid) and by their relevance to query search terms.</p>
<p>Speech data is presented either as two channel wav or single channel sphere files, predominately in 8kHz A-law format, with some wav files at a sample rate of 48kHz. All text data is UTF-8 encoded.</p>
<h3>Samples</h3>
<p>Please view the following samples:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="desc/addenda/LDC2024S10.wav">Audio Sample (WAV)</a></li>
<li><a href="desc/addenda/LDC2024S10.transcription.txt">Transcript Sample (TXT)</a></li>
<li><a href="desc/addenda/LDC2024S10.translation.eng.txt">Translation Sample (TXT)</a></li>
</ul>
<h3>Updates</h3>
<p>None at this time.</p>