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From: picone@trdc001.trdc.ti.com (Joe Picone)
Subject: SWITCHBOARD
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Organization: Tsukuba Research and Development Center
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1993 23:31:19 GMT
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Return-Path: <ehodas@walnut.ling.upenn.edu>
Posted-Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1993 16:27:02 EST
To: ldc-members@unagi.cis.upenn.edu
Subject: LDC Announcement - SWITCHBOARD Corpus
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1993 16:27:02 EST
From: Elizabeth Hodas <ehodas@walnut.ling.upenn.edu>

		
			SWITCHBOARD CORPUS
			    March 1993

The Linguistic Data Consortium is happy to announce the release of the
SWITCHBOARD corpus, a large corpus of conversational speech by many
talkers over long distance telephone lines. SWITCHBOARD was collected
at Texas Instruments and produced on CD-ROMs at the National Institute
for Standards and Technology (NIST). It will be available only through
the LDC.

The entire corpus consists of 2,430 conversations, averaging about six
minutes in length, by 523 speakers from around the United States.  In
round numbers, this amounts to about 240 hours of speech and 3 million
spoken words.  Apart from sheer volume, however, SWITCHBOARD has a
number of unique features designed to support basic research or
technology development for telephone-based applications.  Among these
features are automatic, all-digital collection; detailed transcription
and time alignment of all conversations; documentation of several
important speech research variables; and an underlying relational
database.

The SWITCHBOARD corpus occupies 26 CD-ROMs, of which 25 are sampled
speech data.  The transcripts, time alignment files, database tables,
and documentation have been put on one disk. LDC intends to issue
corrected and enhanced versions as warranted. The text disk will also
be available separately to members who are only interested in text
data.  Members who do specialized annotation of SWITCHBOARD as part of
their research are encouraged to contact LDC about incorporating these
into later versions.

To order your copy of the SWITCHBOARD Corpus, or for more information,
please contact:

        Elizabeth Hodas
        Linguistic Data Consortium
        441 Williams Hall
        University of Pennsylvania
        Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

        Tel: (215) 898-0464
        Fax: (215) 573-2175
        email: ehodas@unagi.cis.upenn.edu.

Please forward this announcement to anyone else at your site who might
be interested.

