CALLFRIEND Egyptian Arabic Second Edition (LDC2019S04)

Introduction

CALLFRIEND Egyptian Arabic Second Edition was developed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and consists of approximately 25 hours of unscripted telephone conversations between native speakers of Egyptian Arabic. This second edition updates the audio files to wav format, simplifies the directory structure and adds documentation and metadata. The first edition is available as CALLFRIEND Egyptian Arabic (LDC96S49).

The CALLFRIEND series is a collection of telephone conversations in several languages conducted by LDC in support of language identification technology development. Languages covered in the collection include American English, Canadian French, Egyptian Arabic, Farsi, German, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Tamil and Vietnamese.

Data

All data was collected before July 1997. Participants could speak with a person of their choice on any topic; most called family members and friends. All calls originated in North America. The recorded conversations last up to 30 minutes.

The data was recorded as 8kHz u-law SPH encoded stereo files, with one end of the phone call on each channel. In this release, files were converted to WAV format, and information from the original SPH headers is described in the documentation. SPH files are not included in this second edition.

The audio files were originally split into train, dev and test folders of 20 recordings each, but they are combined in this release.

Completed calls passed through a human auditing process to verify that the target language was spoken by the participants, to check the quality of the recordings, and to record information about dialect, noise and distortion.