  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.
