Introduction
GALE Phase 4 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Sentences was developed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC). Along with other corpora, the parallel text in this release comprised training data for Phase 4 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) Program. This corpus contains Chinese source sentences and corresponding English translations selected from broadcast news data collected by LDC in 2008 and transcribed and translated by LDC or under its direction.
Data
GALE Phase 4 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Sentences includes 40 source-translation document pairs, comprising 156,429 tokens of Chinese source text and its English translation. Data is drawn from eight distinct Chinese programs broadcast in 2008 from China Central TV, a national and international broadcaster in Mainland China; and Voice of America, a U.S. government-funded broadcast programmer. The programs in this release feature news programs on current events topics.
The data was transcribed by LDC staff and/or transcription vendors under contract to LDC in accordance with the Quick Rich Transcription guidelines developed by LDC. Transcribers indicated sentence boundaries in addition to transcribing the text. Sentences were selected for translation in two steps. First, files were chosen using sentence selection scripts provided by GALE program participants SRI International and IBM. The output was then manually reviewed by LDC staff to eliminate problematic sentences. Selected files were reformatted into a human-readable translation format and assigned to translation vendors. Translators followed LDC's Chinese to English translation guidelines and were provided with the full source documents containing the target sentences for their reference. Bilingual LDC staff performed quality control procedures on the completed translations.
Source data and translations are distributed in TDF format. TDF files are tab-delimited files containing one segment of text along with meta information about that segment. Each field in the TDF file is described in TDF_format.txt. All data are encoded in UTF-8.
Acknowledgment
This work was supported in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, GALE Program Grant No. HR0011-06-1-0003. The content of this publication does not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the Government, and no official endorsement should be inferred. |