BACKGROUND
The purpose of the 1999 NIST Broadcast News Evaluation is to advance the state of the art in technologies required to automatically transcribe recordings of radio and television broadcast news (BN). These BN data contain several challenges to recognition technology including spontaneous speech effects, non-native speakers, reduced bandwidth channels, background noise and music, and combinations of these conditions. In 1999, 2 key technical challenges within the BN domain will be explored:

English Language Broadcast News:

• The core automatic transcription task.
• The less than 10 times real time automatic transcription task.

DATA
A compendium containing all previous English (prior to the 1998 evaluation) Broadcast News Language training, development test, and evaluation test transcripts in the Universal Transcription Format (UTF) is available from the LDC via LDC Order Number LDC98E10. Contact the LDC to obtain this release. All Broadcast News corpora are licensed through the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and are subject to usage restrictions. Contact the LDC for license agreement information.

SOFTWARE
The current version of the NIST SCLITE Speech Recognition Scoring Toolkit is available from the NIST Speech Software Website. The technical contact for the toolkit is speech_webmaster[at]nist.gov at NIST. This software package will be used to provide the official scores for the evaluation.

CONTACT INFORMATION
Please direct all questions and comments to speech_webmaster[at]nist.gov.