LDC March 2014 Newsletter

New publications:

GALE Arabic-English Word Alignment Training Part 1 -- Newswire and Web  GALE Phase 2 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text Part 1  
USC-SFI MALACH Interviews and Transcripts Czech  

---

(1) GALE Arabic-English Word Alignment Training Part 1 -- Newswire and Web was developed by LDC and contains 344,680 tokens of word aligned Arabic and English parallel text enriched with linguistic tags. This material was used as training data in the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) program.

Some approaches to statistical machine translation include the incorporation of linguistic knowledge in word aligned text as a means to improve automatic word alignment and machine translation quality. This is accomplished with two annotation schemes: alignment and tagging. Alignment identifies minimum translation units and translation relations by using minimum-match and attachment annotation approaches. A set of word tags and alignment link tags are designed in the tagging scheme to describe these translation units and relations. Tagging adds contextual, syntactic and language-specific features to the alignment annotation.

This release consists of Arabic source newswire and web data collected by LDC in 2006 - 2008. The distribution by genre, words, character tokens and segments appears below:

Language	Genre	Docs	Words	CharTokens	Segments
Arabic	WB	119	59,696	81,620	4,383
Arabic	NW	717	198,621	263,060	8,423

Note that word count is based on the untokenized Arabic source, and token count is based on the tokenized Arabic source.

The Arabic word alignment tasks consisted of the following components:

• Normalizing tokenized tokens as needed

• Identifying different types of links

• Identifying sentence segments not suitable for annotation

• Tagging unmatched words attached to other words or phrases

GALE Arabic-English Word Alignment Training Part 1 -- Newswire and Web is distributed via web download.

2014 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this data on disc. 2014 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for a fee.

*

(2) GALE Phase 2 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text Part 1 was developed by LDC. Along with other corpora, the parallel text in this release comprised training data for Phase 2 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) Program. This corpus contains Chinese source text and corresponding English translations selected from broadcast news (BN) data collected by LDC between 2005 and 2007 and transcribed by LDC or under its direction.

This release includes 30 source-translation document pairs, comprising 198,350 characters of translated material. Data is drawn from 11 distinct Chinese BN. The broadcast news recordings in this release focus principally on current events.

The data was transcribed by LDC staff and/or transcription vendors under contract to LDC in accordance with Quick Rich Transcription guidelines developed by LDC. Transcribers indicated sentence boundaries in addition to transcribing the text. Data was manually selected for translation according to several criteria, including linguistic features, transcription features and topic features. The transcribed and segmented files were then reformatted into a human-readable translation format and assigned to translation vendors. Translators followed LDC’s Chinese to English translation guidelines. Bilingual LDC staff performed quality control procedures on the completed translations.

Source data and translations are distributed in TDF format. TDF files are tab-delimited files containing one segment of text along with meta information about that segment. Each field in the TDF file is described in TDF_format.text. All data are encoded in UTF-8.

GALE Phase 2 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text Part 1 is distributed via web download.

2014 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this data on disc. 2014 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for a fee.

*

(3) USC-SFI MALACH Interviews and Transcripts Czech was developed by The University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute (USC-SFI) and the University of West Bohemia as part of the MALACH (Multilingual Access to Large Spoken ArCHives) Project. It contains approximately 229 hours of interviews from 420 interviewees along with transcripts and other documentation.

Inspired by his experience making Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg established the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in 1994 to gather video testimonies from survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust. Within several years, the Foundation’s Visual History Archive held nearly 52,000 video testimonies in 32 languages representing 56 countries. It is the largest archive of its kind in the world. In 2006, the Foundation became part of the Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and was renamed as the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education.

The goal of the MALACH project was to develop methods for improved access to large multinational spoken archives. The focus was advancing the state of the art of automatic speech recognition and information retrieval. The characteristics of the USC-SFI collection -- unconstrained, natural speech filled with disfluencies, heavy accents, age-related coarticulations, un-cued speaker and language switching and emotional speech -- were considered well-suited for that task. The work centered on five languages: English, Czech, Russian, Polish and Slovak.


LDC has also released USC-SFI MALACH Interviews and Transcripts English (LDC2012S05).

The speech data in this release was collected beginning in 1994 under a wide variety of conditions ranging from quiet to noisy. Original interviews were recorded on Sony Beta SP tapes, then digitized into a 3 MB/s MPEG-1 stream with 128 kb/s (44 kHz) stereo audio. The sound files in this release are single channel FLAC compressed PCM WAV format at a sampling frequency of 16 kHz.

Approximately 570 of all USC-SFI collected interviews are in Czech and average approximately 2.25 hours each. The interviews sessions in this release are divided into a training set (400 interviews) and a test set (20 interviews). The first fifteen minutes of the second tape from each training interview (approximately 30 total minutes of speech) were transcribed in .trs format using Transcriber 1.5.1. The test interviews were transcribed completely. Thus the corpus consists of 229 hours of speech (186 hours of training material plus 43 hours of test data) with 143 hours transcribed (100 hours of training material plus 43 hours of test data). Certain interviews include speech from family members in addition to that of the subject and the interviewer. Accordingly, the corpus contains speech from more than 420 speakers, who are more or less equally distributed between males and females.

USC-SFI MALACH Interviews and Transcripts Czech is distributed on four DVD-ROM.

2014 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this data provided that they have submitted a completed copy of the User License Agreement for USC-SFI MALACH Interviews and Transcripts Czech (LDC2014S04)   2014 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for a fee.