CABank English CallHome Corpus

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In accordance with TalkBank rules, any use of data from this corpus must be accompanied by at least one of the above references.

Project Description

The CallHome English corpus of telephone speech was collected and transcribed by the Linguistic Data Consortium primarily in support of the project on Large Vocabulary Conversational Speech Recognition (LVCSR), sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense.

This release of the CallHome English corpus consists of 120 unscripted telephone conversations between native speakers of English. The CD-ROM distribution contains the speech data only, along with essential documentation files and software for handling the compressed speech data. The transcripts and other text data and documentation are distributed separately (typically via electronic transmission from the LDC's ftp/web server), and will be subject to periodic updates. The transcripts cover a contiguous 5 or 10 minute segment (see section 2 below) taken from a recorded conversation lasting up to 30 minutes. All speakers were aware that they were being recorded. They were given no guidelines concerning what they should talk about. Once a caller was recruited to participate, he/she was given a free choice of whom to call. Most participants called family members or close friends overseas. All calls originated in North America; 90 of the 120 calls were placed to various locations overseas, while the remaining 30 were placed within North America. The distribution of call destinations can be found in the file "spkrinfo.tbl". The transcripts are timestamped by speaker turn for alignment with the speech signal, and are provided in standard orthography.

Speakers were solicited by the LDC to participate in this telephone speech collection effort via the internet, publications (advertisements), and personal contacts. A total of 200 call originators were found, each of whom placed a telephone call via a toll-free robot operator maintained by the LDC. Access to the robot operator was possible via a unique Personal Identification Number (PIN) issued by the recruiting staff at the LDC when the caller enrolled in the project. The participants were made aware that their telephone call would be recorded, as were the call recipients. The call was allowed only if both parties agreed to being recorded. Each caller was allowed to talk up to 30 minutes. Upon successful completion of the call, the caller was paid $20 (in addition to making a free long-distance telephone call). Each caller was allowed to place only one telephone call.

Although the goal of the call collection effort was to have unique speakers in all calls, a handful of repeat speakers are included in the corpus. In all, 200 calls were transcribed. Of these, 80 have been designated as training calls, 20 as development test calls, and 100 as evaluation test calls. For each of the training and development test calls, a contiguous 10-minute region was selected for transcription; for the evaluation test calls, a 5-minute region was transcribed. For the present publication, only 20 of the evaluation test calls are being released; the remaining 80 test calls are being held in reserve for future LVCSR benchmark tests.

After a successful call was completed, a human audit of each telephone call was conducted to verify that the proper language was spoken, to check the quality of the recording, and to select and describe the region to be transcribed. The description of the transcribed region provides information about channel quality, number of speakers, their gender, and other attributes.

English	Sex	Age	Age	Place
0638	F	20	15	PA
6067	F	18	12	NJ
4838	F	18	13	NY
6079	F	19	13	NY
6100	F	19	15	LA
4092	F	22	16	PA
5788	F	22	16	TX
6479	F	22	17	OH
5352	F	22	17	PA
6107	F	23	16	NY
5273	F	23	16	OH
4432	F	23	17	NY
4886	F	24	13	PA
4624	F	24	16	MI
5931	F	24	18	PA
4490	F	24	18	SC
4844	F	25	13	OH
5777	F	25	16	MI
4887	F	25	18	DC
4365	F	25	21	WI
5573	F	26	18	MA
4913	F	26	18	NY
4660	F	27	16	MO
4157	F	28	16	MO
4926	F	30	12	NY
4077	F	30	16	WA
4861	F	30	18	IN
4628	F	30	19	WY
4576	F	31	18	IL
6467	F	31	18	OH
6625	F	32	18	FL
4145	F	32	21	CA
4245	F	32	21	NE
4248	F	32	21	PA
6348	F	33	12	IL
5388	F	33	13	NE
4595	F	33	18	NY
4610	F	33	21	NY
4315	F	34	16	MA
4564	F	34	16	VA
4927	F	34	18	NY
6071	F	35	18	FL
5254	F	35	18	NY
6047	F	36	16	WI
4571	F	36	18	NE
4431	F	36	20	IL
4065	F	36	23	MD
4459	F	37	16	CA
4325	F	38	13	VT
4580	F	38	18	NJ
5907	F	38	20	ID
5046	F	39	22	CA
4104	F	40	16	CA
5700	F	40	16	IA
4234	F	42	17	NY
5866	F	43	12	AR
5888	F	44	16	ID
4544	F	45	18	MA
4822	F	46	18	CA
5278	F	46	18	NY
4310	F	47	18	NH
4665	F	47	18	PA
4666	F	48	16	PA
4335	F	48	18	IA
5551	F	49	16	WI
4623	F	52	13	NY
6161	F	53	18	TX
6456	F	54	20	OH
6033	F	54	20	WI
4941	F	56	16	NY
4112	F	56	19	CA
5736	F	57	16	CA
6274	F	57	16	WI
4705	F	57	22	OR
5495	F	61	20	WA
5242	F	63	12	IL
6314	F	63	14	IL
6252	F	65	17	WI
5712	F	65	20	MI
5648	F	66	18	CT
6045	F	66	18	WI
4556	F	67	14	NJ
5532	F	67	16	IL
6447	F	71	20	WI
5208	F	74	16	WI
6408	F	77	12	MN
4673	F	80	17	MI
4569	F	80	17	MI
4677	M	13	7	WV
4521	M	19	13	NY
6825	M	19	14	NY
6265	M	20	15	NY
6521	M	21	15	OH
4967	M	26	7	UT
4093	M	27	16	WA
4801	M	27	17	WA
4721	M	27	18	FL
6861	M	27	19	UT
5166	M	28	18	MD
5872	M	29	15	CA
4485	M	29	21	MA
4686	M	30	18	FL
4074	M	30	18	TX
4371	M	30	20	NE
5373	M	31	25	Canada
6313	M	32	18	NY
4415	M	33	17	NC
4612	M	37	16	VA
4829	M	38	18	CT
6179	M	43	16	NY
4247	M	43	17	varied
5713	M	43	18	CT
6785	M	46	16	AR
4792	M	48	17	NY
4807	M	54	17	NJ
4184	M	54	20	NY
4702	M	55	13	KA
6298	M	74	12	WI
4808	M	76	14	MA
4629	M	8	3	IL