ICSI Meeting Transcripts


Introduction

ICSI Meeting Transcripts was produced by Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) catalog number LDC2004T04 and ISBN 1-58563-286-4.

The ICSI Meeting corpus is a collection of 75 meetings collected at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley during the years 2000-2002. The meetings included are "natural" meetings in the sense that they would have occurred anyway: they are generally regular weekly meetings of various ICSI working teams, including the team working on the ICSI Meeting Project. In recording meetings of this type, we hoped to capture meeting dynamics and speaking styles that are as natural as possible given that speakers are wearing close-talking microphones and are fully cognizant of the recording process. The speech files range in length from 17 to 103 minutes, but generally run just under an hour each. The speech files are available as ICSI Meeting Speech.

Data

This corpus consists of 75 word-level transcripts (one transcript file per meeting), time-synchronized to digitized audio recordings.

The meetings were recorded with close-talking and far-field microphones. The transcripts were based mostly on the close-talking microphones, either separately or blended together in a so-called "mixed" channel. The focus of the transcripts was on capturing the flow of audible events, especially the words which were spoken, and who spoke them.

Transcripts were prepared by means of the "Channeltrans" interface. Channeltrans is an extension of the "Transcriber" interface.

There are a total of 53 unique speakers in the corpus. Meetings involved anywhere from 3 to 10 participants, averaging 6. The corpus contains a significant proportion of non-native English speakers, varying in fluency from nearly-native to challenging-to-transcribe.

The following documentation files are provided:
overview.txt overview of the corpus
trans_guide.txt description of the transcription process and transcription conventions
Meeting1_annotated.dtd text file specifying the MRT format, including annotations and examples of use
Meeting1_annotated_dtd.html html file specifying the MRT format, including annotations and examples of use
icsi1.spk a compilation of speaker information (XML format)
naming.txt text file describing the naming conventions for meetings, participant IDs, microphone types, and transmission types
naming.html html file describing the naming conventions for meetings, participant IDs, microphone types, and transmission types
seatingchart.txt a simple diagram of the meeting table with rough indications of seat and table-top microphone placement
all.blp a listing of all intervals where speech is censored in plain text format

For more information please consult the trans_guide.txt file in the doc directory.

For a complete listing of the files please see file.tbl in the doc directory.

Sponsorship

The collection and preparation of this corpus was made possible in large part through funding from DARPA, both through the Communicator project and through a ROAR "seedling", the Swiss IM2 project (National Centre of Competence in Research, sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation), and a supplementary award from IBM.

Updates

Additional information, updates, bug fixes may be available in the LDC catalog entry for this corpus at LDC2004T04.

Please contact mrcontact@icsi.berkeley.edu with any questions regarding this corpus.

Content Copyright

Portions © 2000-2003 International Computer Science Institute, © 2004 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania


Contact: ldc@ldc.upenn.edu
© 2004 Linguistic Data Consortium, Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania. All Rights Reserved.