A Recorded Debating Dataset

Abstract

This paper describes an English audio and textual dataset of debating speeches, a unique resource for the growing research field of computational argumentation and debating technologies. We detail the process of speech recording by professional debaters, the transcription of the speeches with an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system, their consequent automatic processing to produce a text that is more "NLP-friendly", and in parallel -- the manual transcription of the speeches in order to produce gold-standard "reference" transcripts. We release 60 speeches on various controversial topics, each in five formats corresponding to the different stages in the production of the data. The intention is to allow utilizing this resource for multiple research purposes, be it the addition of in-domain training data for a debate-specific ASR system, or applying argumentation mining on either noisy or clean debate transcripts. We intend to make further releases of this data in the future.

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