IARPA Babel Zulu Language Pack IARPA-babel206b-v0.1e (LDC2017S19)

Introduction

IARPA Babel Zulu Language Pack IARPA-babel206b-v0.1e was developed by Appen for the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) Babel program. It contains approximately 211 hours of Zulu conversational and scripted telephone speech collected in 2012 and 2013 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 Zulu speech in this release represents that spoken in the KZN (KwaZulu-Natal)-urban dialect region of South Africa. The gender distribution among speakers is approximately equal; speakers' ages range from 16 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.

Audio data is presented as 8kHz 8-bit a-law encoded audio in sphere format and 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.

Evaluation data is available from NIST in support of OpenKWS.