Corpora: SWITCHBOARD-1 Price Reduction

From: LDC Office (ldc@unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
Date: Thu Jan 27 2000 - 23:02:56 MET

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    The Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) is pleased to
    announce a price reduction in SWITCHBOARD-1. We have
    reduced the price from $10,000 to $2,000. Since its
    original release in 1993, it continues to be a
    popular resource for research and development in
    speaker identification and speech recognition.

    SWITCHBOARD-1, originally developed by Texas
    Instruments in 1990-1, is a collection of about 2400
    two-sided telephone conversations among 543 speakers
    (302 male, 241 female) from all areas of the United
    States. A computer-driven "robot operator" system
    handled the calls, giving the caller appropriate
    recorded prompts, selecting and dialing another
    person (the callee) to take part in a conversation,
    introducing a topic for discussion and recording the
    speech from the two subjects into separate channels
    until the conversation was finished. About 70 topics
    were provided, of which about 50 were used
    frequently. Selection of topics and callees was
    constrained so that: (1) no two speakers would
    converse together more than once and (2) no one spoke
    more than once on a given topic.

    The Institute for Signal and Information Processing
    (ISIP) at Mississippi State University, under the
    direction of Joe Picone, has developed an updated
    version of the SWITCHBOARD-1 transcripts. These
    transcripts can be obtained free of charge from the
    ISIP website: http://www.isip.msstate.edu/. The
    updated transcripts will soon be incorporated into
    LDC Online where current LDC members can browse,
    search, listen to, and perform various statistical
    summaries of the text of the conversations.

    If you would like to order a copy of this corpus,
    please email your request to
    <ldc@unagi.cis.upenn.edu>. If you need additional
    information before placing your order, or would like
    to inquire about membership in the LDC, please send
    email or call (215) 898-0464.

    Further information about the LDC and its available
    corpora can be accessed on the Linguistic Data
    Consortium WWW Home Page at URL:

    http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/

    If you do not wish to receive further announcements
    regarding LDC and its available resources, please
    write to ldc@ldc.upenn.edu



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