From Speech to Trees: Applying Treebank Annotation to Arabic Broadcast News

The Arabic Treebank (ATB) Project at the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) has embarked on a large corpus of Broadcast News (BN) transcriptions, and this has led to a number of new challenges for the data processing and annotation procedures that were originally developed for Arabic newswire text (ATB1, ATB2 and ATB3). The corpus requirements currently posed by the DARPA GALE Program, including English translation of Arabic BN transcripts, word-level alignment of Arabic and English data, and creation of a corresponding English Treebank, place significant new constraints on ATB corpus creation, and require careful coordination among a wide assortment of concurrent activities and participants. Nonetheless, in spite of the new challenges posed by BN data, the ATB's newly improved pipeline and revised annotation guidelines for newswire have proven to be robust enough that very few changes were necessary to account for the new genre of data. This paper presents the points where some ad...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: LREC
• Authors: Mohamed Maamouri, Ann Bies, Seth Kulick, Wajdi Zaghouani, Dave Graff, Mike Ciul
• Keywords: Arabic BN Transcripts, ATB Corpus Creation, BN ATB Data, Education, LREC 2010