The Tdt-3 Text and Speech Corpus

The TDT-3 Text and Speech Corpus expands on previous phases of Topic Detection and Tracking data collections, by increasing the number of news sources being sampled, by including Mandarin Chinese as well as English news data, and by introducing new forms of topic annotation. In order to satisfy the specific data and annotation requirements of the TDT-3 Evaluation Plan[1], the LDC refined and supplemented the methods that had been used in TDT-2 corpus development[2]. There were significant changes and improvements in the process of selecting and defining target topics,in the procedures for quality assurance applied to both data content and annotations, and in the organization of the delivered corpus. In addition, the LDC created or acquired a range of resources to support research in cross-language information retrieval. These included the addition of a Mandarin Chinese component to the TDT-2 Text and Speech Corpus, the collection of a large body of Chinese-English parallel text, and adaptation of Chinese-to-English and English-to-Chinese glossing lexicons. All the resources that we have developed for use by the participants in the TDT-3 Evaluation are being added to the LDC’s catalog of corpora for general availability.