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1997 Mandarin Broadcast News Speech and Transcripts
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This collection consists of 30 hours of recorded broadcasts
and transcripts that have been drawn from the following
sources:
Voice of America (VOA): United States Information Agency Radio
People's Republic of China Television (CCTV)
Commercial radio based in Los Angeles, CA. (KAZN-AM)
Of these three sources, the first two comprise the bulk of the
collection, and are represented in roughly equal amounts; only
a relatively small sample of KAZN-AM recordings are included,
owing to the relatively high proportion of unusable material
(commercials, local traffic reports loaded with California
place names, etc).
The transcripts were created by native speakers of Mandarin
working at the LDC; they are in GB-encoded form, with SGML
tagging to identify story boundaries, speaker turn boundaries,
and phrasal pauses; these tags include time stamps to align
the text with the speech data. Word segmentation (white-space
between words) is included. A working DTD is provided, and
the markup is consistent with that of the 1997 English and
Spanish Hub-4 collections.
Because of restrictions imposed by the copyright holders, this
corpus is available to 1998 LDC members only. Members who wish
to receive this corpus must sign the 1997 Mandarin Broadcast
News license. This license can be retrieved from the LDC
website at:
http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/ldc/catalog/nonmem_agree/agreements.html
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: