Corpora: SWITCHBOARD-1 Price Reduction

[LDC Office]

The Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) is pleased to
announce a price reduction in SWITCHBOARD-1.  We have
reduced the price from $10,000 to $2,000.  Since its
original release in 1993, it continues to be a
popular resource for research and development in
speaker identification and speech recognition.

SWITCHBOARD-1, originally developed by Texas
Instruments in 1990-1, is a collection of about 2400
two-sided telephone conversations among 543 speakers
(302 male, 241 female) from all areas of the United
States. A computer-driven "robot operator" system
handled the calls, giving the caller appropriate
recorded prompts, selecting and dialing another
person (the callee) to take part in a conversation,
introducing a topic for discussion and recording the
speech from the two subjects into separate channels
until the conversation was finished. About 70 topics
were provided, of which about 50 were used
frequently.  Selection of topics and callees was
constrained so that: (1) no two speakers would
converse together more than once and (2) no one spoke
more than once on a given topic.

The Institute for Signal and Information Processing
(ISIP) at Mississippi State University, under the
direction of Joe Picone, has developed an updated
version of the SWITCHBOARD-1 transcripts.  These
transcripts can be obtained free of charge from the
ISIP website: http://www.isip.msstate.edu/.  The
updated transcripts will soon be incorporated into
LDC Online where current LDC members can browse,
search, listen to, and perform various statistical
summaries of the text of the conversations.

If you would like to order a copy of this corpus,
please email your request to
<ldc at 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:

http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/

If you do not wish to receive further announcements
regarding LDC and its available resources, please
write to ldc at ldc.upenn.edu