MATERIAL Swahili-English Language Pack

Introduction

MATERIAL Swahili-English Language Pack, Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) Catalog Number LDC2026S01 was developed by Appen for the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) MATERIAL (Machine Translation for English Retrieval of Information in Any Language) program. It contains approximately 112 hours of Swahili conversational telephone speech, transcripts, English translations, annotations and queries.

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.

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 69 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.

Transcripts cover approximately 30% of the speech data, and approximately 3% of the speech data was translated into English. Further information about transcription and translation methodologies is contained in the documentation accompanying this release.

Swahili-English Language Pack also includes domain annotations, English queries and their relevance annotations.

Speech data is presented either as two channel wav or single channel sphere files, predominately in 8kHz A-law format. Some files 48kHz and single channel. All text data is UTF-8 encoded.

Updates

No updates at this time.