IARPA Babel Tamil Language Pack IARPA-babel204b-v1.1b

Introduction IARPA Babel Tamil Language Pack IARPA-babel204b-v1.1b was developed by Appen for the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) Babel program. It contains approximately 350 hours of Tamil conversational and scripted telephone speech collected in 2012 and 2013 along with corresponding transcripts. The Babel program focuses on underserved languages and seeks to develop speech recognition technology that can be rapidly applied to any human language to support keyword search performance over large amounts of recorded speech. Data The Tamil speech in this release represents that spoken in the Northern, Central, Southern and Western dialect regions of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The gender distribution among speakers is approximately equal; speakers’ ages range from 16 years to 65 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. Audio data is presented as 8kHz 8-bit a-law encoded audio in sphere format and 48kHz 24-bit PCM encoded audio in wav format. Transcripts are encoded in UTF-8. The romanization scheme was developed by Appen. Further information about transcription methodology is contained in the documentation accompanying this release.