Get the MELI corpus

Download

MELI is available through the UBC Research Data Collection via Scholars Portal Dataverse. You can access MELI from the button below.

MELI is freely available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. That means you can use, copy, share, and adapt it, as long as you don't release your adaptation with additional restrictions, and you cite the corpus.

💐 As you explore the corpus, I hope you’ll take a moment to appreciate the people behind the data: their willingness to share their voices, perspectives, and stories. Please engage with the material with care and curiosity.



Download MELI

Citation

We prefer that you cite the corpus directly:

@data{liubabel2026meli,
    author = {Liu, Suyuan and Babel, Molly},
    publisher = {Scholars Portal Dataverse},
    title = {MELI: Mandarin-English Language Interview},
    year = {2026},
    version = {Version 1},
    doi = {10.5683/SP3/5WMRUO},
    url = {https://doi.org/10.5683/SP3/5WMRUO}
}

What's in the download?

The download comes with:

  • A README.md file
  • Tabular metadata including language background
  • Out-of-vocabulary (OOV) files used in the forced alignment process
  • A copy of this documentation
  • 2 languages x 51 talkers = 102 .wav files (stereo, 16-bit, 44.1 kHz)
  • 2 languages x 51 talkers = 102 .TextGrid files (each with 4 tiers: task, utterance-corrected, word, phone)
  • 1 map x 51 talkers = 51 .png files from the draw-a-map task

The wav and textgrid files have a consitent format. For example, F01A_man would correspond to the following:

Text What it means Other categories
F Female M = Male
01 Year of Birth varies (19)89-(20)05
man Language eng


Unique participant IDs are made up of the first four characters. In this example, that would be F01A. This ID is used in the language background summary.

Ethics

The corpus was developed in accordance with the University of British Columbia Behavioural Research Ethics Board (H23-03205).

Funding

MELI was funded by Arts Graduate Research Awards to Suyuan Liu and by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Grant to Molly Babel.