IARPA Babel Igbo Language Pack IARPA-babel306b-v2.0c (LDC2019S16)

Introduction

IARPA Babel Igbo Language Pack IARPA-babel306b-v2.0c was developed by Appen for the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) Babel program. It contains approximately 207 hours of Igbo conversational and scripted telephone speech collected in 2014 and 2015 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 Igbo speech in this release represents the Owerri, Onitsha, and Ngwa dialects spoken in Nigeria. The gender distribution among speakers is approximately equal; speakers' ages range from 16 years to 67 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 and included for approximately 65% of the speech. Further information about transcription methodology is contained in the documentation accompanying this release.

Evaluation data is available from NIST in support of OpenKWS.