MATERIAL Somali-English Language Pack was developed by Appen for the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) MATERIAL (Machine Translation for English Retrieval of Information in Any Language) program. It contains approximately 80 hours of Somali conversational telephone speech, transcripts, English translations, annotations and queries. The MATERIAL program focused on underserved languages with the ultimate goal to build cross language information retrieval systems to find speech and text content using English search queries. The Somali speech in this release represents that spoken in the Northern and Benaadir dialect regions of Somalia. The gender distribution among speakers is approximately equal; speakers' ages range from 16 years to 60 years. Calls were made using different telephones (e.g., mobile, landline) from a variety of environments including the street, a home or office, a public place, and inside a vehicle. Transcripts cover approximately 10% of the speech data, and approximately 4% of the speech data was translated into English. Further information about transcription and translation methodologies is contained in the documentation accompanying this release. Somali-English Language Pack also includes domain annotations, English queries and their relevance annotations. Annotators marked transcripts by domain (e.g., lifestyle, business-and-commerce, sports, education, and so on), by query (simple, conceptual, hybrid) and by their relevance to query search terms. Speech data is presented either as two channel wav or single channel sphere files, predominately in 8kHz A-law format, with some wav files at a sample rate of 48kHz. All text data is UTF-8 encoded.

Creator(s)

Zeinab Abdi

Zahra Ali

Aric Bills

Judith Bishop

Anne Boyle

Sarra Chouder

Nathaniel Clair

Tom Conners

Cassian Corey

Eyal Dubinski

Corinna Ellis

Jess Fernando

Paul Gibby

Farah Abdi

Simon Hammond

Maxime Hubert

Alice Kaiser-Schatzlein

Michael Kazi

Julie Lam

Rosie Lazar

Hanh Le

Michael Levot

Nicolas Malyska

Jennifer Melot

Alyssa Mensch

Abdulkadir Arale Omar

Shelley Paget

Frederick Richardson

Carl Rubino

Bern Samko

Gregory Sanders

Stephanie Soh

Tania Strahan

Jonathan Taylor

Brian Thompson

Audrey Tong

Richard Tong

Julie Yelle

Jennifer Yu

Ilya Zavorin

Distributor(s)

Linguistic Data Consortium

Right Holder(s)

Portions © 2024 U.S. Government, © 2024 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania The U.S. Government acquired this data from Appen which assigned the copyright to the data in the U.S. Government.