Audio Data Set: Start Your AI Engines
August 16, 2019
Machine learning projects have a new source of training data. BoingBoing announces the new “Open Archive of 240,000 Hours’ Worth of Talk Radio, Including 2.8 Billion Words of Machine-Transcription.” A project of MIT Media Lab, Radiotalk holds a wealth of machine-generated transcriptions of talk radio broadcasts between October 2018 and March 2019. Naturally, the text is all tagged with machine-readable metadata. The team hopes their work will enrich research in natural language processing, conversational analysis, and social sciences. Writer Cory Doctorow comments:
“I’m mostly interested in the social science implications here: talk radio is incredibly important to the US political discourse, but because it is ephemeral and because recorded speech is hard to data-mine, we have very little quantitative analysis of this body of work. As Gretchen McCulloch points out in her new book on internet-era language, Because Internet, research on human speech has historically relied on expensive human transcription, leading to very small and corpuses covering a very small fraction of human communication. This corpus is part of a shift that allows social scientists, linguists and political scientists to study a massive core-sample of spoken language in our public discourse.”
The metadata attached to these transcripts includes information about geographical location, speaker turn boundaries, gender, and radio program information. Curious readers can access the researchers’ paper here (PDF).
Cynthia Murrell, August 16, 2019
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