MD3: The Multi-Dialect Dataset of Dialogues
Jacob Eisenstein Vinodkumar Prabhakaran Clara Rivera Dorottya Demszky Devyani Sharma
We introduce a new dataset of conversational speech representing English from
India, Nigeria, and the United States. The Multi-Dialect Dataset of Dialogues
(MD3) strikes a new balance between open-ended conversational speech and
task-oriented dialogue by prompting participants to perform a series of short
information-sharing tasks. This facilitates quantitative cross-dialectal
comparison, while avoiding the imposition of a restrictive task structure that
might inhibit the expression of dialect features. Preliminary analysis of the
dataset reveals significant differences in syntax and in the use of discourse
markers. The dataset, which will be made publicly available with the
publication of this paper, includes more than 20 hours of audio and more than
200,000 orthographically-transcribed tokens.