The ICSI Meeting Corpus is a collection of 75 meetings -- including simultaneous multi-channel audio recordings, word-level orthographic transcriptions, and supporting documentation -- collected at the
International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley during the years 2000-2002. The meetings included are "natural" meetings in the sense that they would have occurred anyway: they are generally regular weekly meetings of various ICSI working teams, including the
team working on the ICSI Meeting Project. In recording meetings of this type, we hoped to capture meeting dynamics and speaking styles that are as natural as possible given that speakers are wearing close-talking microphones and are fully cognizant of the recording process. The meetings included here range in length from 17 to 103 minutes, but generally run just under an hour each. The collection includes a total of approximately 72 hours of Meeting Room speech.

This document contains an overview of the Meeting Project, including the collection, transcription, and data preparation process. Further details are provided in the other documentation in this directory.

As part of this release, we provide:

* audio -- for each of the 75 meetings, a directory containing simultaneous recordings of up to 16 channels: close-talking channels for each participant, plus 6 table-top mics.

* transcripts -- for each meeting, a word-level orthographic transcription, plus annotations of speech and nonspeech events and general meeting information, available in the form of an "MRT" file, an XML format designed for this corpus.

* doc -- in addition to this overview, files describing the transcription conventions, the MRT specification, a table of enrolled speakers, and other useful information.

The Recording Set-up

The meetings were simultaneously recorded using close-talking microphones for each speaker (generally head-mounted, but early meetings contain some lapel mics), as well as six table-top microphones: 4 high-quality omnidirectional PZM microphones arrayed down the center of the conference table, and 2 inexpensive microphone elements mounted on a mock PDA. See the "naming.txt" or "naming.html" and "seatingchart.txt" files in the doc directory for further details.

The data were collected at a 48 kHZ sample-rate, downsampled on the fly to 16 kHz. Audio files for each meeting are provided as separate time-synchronous recordings for each channel, encoded as 16-bit linear (big-endian) wavefiles, shorten-compressed in NIST SPHERE format.(Consult the "Known Problems, Useful Facts" section below for an important note on the synchronicity of the recordings.)

All meetings were recorded in the same (roughly, 13 x 25 foot) instrumented meeting room. The room contains a central conference table almost completely filling the room, and can seat up to about 15
people (though we were only equipped to record up to 10). Although we did not introduce the convention until part way through our collection process, later meetings identify the seat number of each participant in order to support speaker localization research and provide adjacency information. A diagram of the set-up may be found in the "seatingchart.txt" document.

The meeting room contains whiteboards along three walls and is equipped with projection equipment; people writing on whiteboards or projecting slides can occasionally be heard during these recordings.
However, no video is available to supplement the audio recordings. The low-level hum of the meeting room lights and fan is also audible, particularly on the far-field mics. The nearby elevators and hallway
conversation are also occasionally heard.