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<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
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<TITLE>Frequently Asked Questions about Transcriber</TITLE>
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<META NAME="Author" CONTENT="Edouard Geoffrois">
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<H4>Why did we start developping Transcriber?</H4>
<P>In the framework of a project for automatic transcription of Broadcast
News in French, we needed a corpus of manually transcribed Broadcast News
material to train and develop the system. For that purpose, a suitable
software environment was required. The <A HREF="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/" TARGET="_top">LDC</A>
already had the experience of creating Broadcast News corpora. However,
the software environment they use ran on high-end servers or rely on third-party
software. We therefore looked for other solutions (which are detailed in
an article presented at the <A HREF="http://ceres.ugr.es/~rubio/elra.html" TARGET="_top">LREC
conference</A>; see Question 3 below), but none was fully satisfactory,
and we therefore decided to build our own tool, in collaboration with the
LDC.</P>
<H4>Why did we release Transcriber as Free Software?</H4>
<P>There are several reasons:</P>
<UL>
<LI>To encourage people to produce transcriptions.</LI>
<LI>To facilitate sharing of corpora: Corpora developped at different sites
are more likely to be consistent if they are produced with a common tool.</LI>
<LI>Because making Transcriber widely available in source form can increase
its quality: We hope that the feedback we will get in terms of suggestions,
contributions and bug reports will outweight the time spent to distribute
it and organize the discussions about it.</LI>
<LI>And last but not least, because the free software model is getting
more and more successful.</LI>
</UL>
<P>To understand better why one might be willing to distribute software
freely, you can read about the <A HREF="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html" TARGET="_top">philosophy
of free software</A> (<A HREF="http://gnu.via.ecp.fr/philosophy/philosophy.html" TARGET="_top">mirror
in Europe</A>) promoted by the FSF. </P>
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