IARPA Babel Swahili Language Pack IARPA-babel202b-v1.0d

Introduction

IARPA Babel Swahili Language Pack IARPA-babel202b-v1.0d was developed by Appen for the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) Babel program. It contains approximately 350 hours of Swahili conversational and scripted telephone speech collected from 2012-2014 along with corresponding transcripts.

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.

Data

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 65 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.

Audio data is presented as 8kHz 8-bit a-law encoded audio in sphere format or 48kHz 24-bit PCM encoded audio in wav format. Transcripts are encoded in UTF-8. Further information about transcription methodology is contained in the documentation accompanying this release.

Additional evaluation data is available from NIST in support of OpenKWS.

Samples

Please view this speech sample and transcript sample.

Updates

None at this time.

Portions © 2015 U.S. Government

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