LDC 2015 January Newsletter

LDC Membership Discounts for MY 2015 Still Available

New publications:

GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast News Speech Part 2

GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast News Transcripts Part 2

SenSem Databank

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LDC Membership Discounts for MY 2015 Still Available

If you are considering joining LDC for Membership Year 2015 (MY2015), there is still time to save on membership fees. Any organization which joins or renews membership for 2015 through Monday, March 2, 2015, is entitled to a 5% discount on membership fees.  Organizations which held membership for MY2014 can receive a 10% discount on fees provided they renew prior to March 2, 2015.  For further information on planned publications for MY2015, please visit or contact LDC.

New publications

GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast News Speech Part 2 was developed by LDC and is comprised of approximately 170 hours of Arabic broadcast news speech collected in 2007 by LDC, MediaNet, Tunis, Tunisia and MTC, Rabat, Morocco during Phase 2 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) Program. Corresponding transcripts are released as GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast News Transcripts Part 1 (LDC2015T01).

Broadcast audio for the GALE program was collected at LDC’s Philadelphia, PA USA facilities and at three remote collection sites: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong King (Chinese), Medianet (Tunis, Tunisia) (Arabic), and MTC (Rabat, Morocco) (Arabic). The combined local and outsourced broadcast collection supported GALE at a rate of approximately 300 hours per week of programming from more than 50 broadcast sources for a total of over 30,000 hours of collected broadcast audio over the life of the program.

The broadcast recordings in this release feature news programs focusing principally on current events from the following sources: Abu Dhabi TV, a television station based in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; Al Alam News Channel, based in Iran; Aljazeera , a regional broadcaster located in Doha, Qatar; Al Ordiniyah, a national broadcast station in Jordan; Dubai TV, based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Al Iraqiyah, a television network based in Iraq; Kuwait TV, a national television station based in Kuwait; Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation, a Lebanese television station; Nile TV, a broadcast programmer based in Egypt; Saudi TV, a national television station based in Saudi Arabia; and Syria TV, the national television station in Syria.

This release contains 204 audio files presented in FLAC-compressed Waveform Audio File format (.flac), 16000 Hz single-channel 16-bit PCM. Each file was audited by a native Arabic speaker following Audit Procedure Specification Version 2.0 which is included in this release. The broadcast auditing process served three principal goals: as a check on the operation of the broadcast collection system equipment by identifying failed, incomplete or faulty recordings; as an indicator of broadcast schedule changes by identifying instances when the incorrect program was recorded; and as a guide for data selection by retaining information about a program’s genre, data type and topic.

GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast News Speech Part 2 is distributed on 3 DVD-ROM.

2015 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus.  2015 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for a fee.

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GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast News Transcripts Part 2 was developed by LDC and contains transcriptions of approximately 170 hours of Arabic broadcast news speech collected in 2007 by LDC, MediaNet, Tunis, Tunisia and MTC, Rabat, Morocco during Phase 2 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) program. Corresponding audio data is released as GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast News Speech Part 2 (LDC2015S01).

The transcript files are in plain-text, tab-delimited format (TDF) with UTF-8 encoding, and the transcribed data totals 920,730 tokens. The transcripts were created with the LDC-developed transcription tool, XTrans, a multi-platform, multilingual, multi-channel transcription tool that supports manual transcription and annotation of audio recordings.

The files in this corpus were transcribed by LDC staff and/or by transcription vendors under contract to LDC. Transcribers followed LDC's quick transcription guidelines (QTR) and quick rich transcription specification (QRTR) both of which are included in the documentation with this release. QTR transcription consists of quick (near-)verbatim, time-aligned transcripts plus speaker identification with minimal additional mark-up. It does not include sentence unit annotation. QRTR annotation adds structural information such as topic boundaries and manual sentence unit annotation to the core components of a quick transcript. Files with QTR as part of the filename were developed using QTR transcription. Files with QRTR in the filename indicate QRTR transcription.

GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast News Transcripts Part 2 is distributed via web download.

2015 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus.  2015 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for a fee.

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SenSem (Sentence Semantics) Databank was developed by GRIAL, the Linguistic Applications Inter-University Research Group that includes the following Spanish institutions: the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, the Universitat de Barcelona, the Universitat de Lleida and the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. It contains syntactic and semantic annotation for over 35,000 sentences, approximately one million words of Spanish and approximately 700,000 words of Catalan translated from the Spanish. GRIAL's work focuses on resources for applied linguistics, including lexicography, translation and natural language processing.

Each sentence in SenSem Databank was labeled according to the verb sense it exemplifies, the type of complement it takes (arguments or adjuncts) and the syntactic category and function. Each argument was also labeled with a semantic role. Further information about the SenSem project can be obtained from the GRIAL website.

The Spanish source data includes texts from news journals (30,000 sentences) and novels (5,299 sentences). Those sentences represent around 1,000 different verb meanings that correspond to the 250 most frequent Spanish verbs. Verb frequencies were retrieved from a quantitative analysis of around 13 million words.

The Catalan corpus was developed by translating the news journal portion of the Spanish data set, resulting in a resource of over 700,000 sentences from which 391,267 sentences were annotated. Sentences were automatically translated and manually post-edited; some were re-annotated for sentence complements. Semantic information was the same for both languages. The Catalan sentences represent close to 1,300 different verbs.

SenSem Databank is distributed via web download.

2015 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus on disc.  2015 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for a fee. This data is made available to LDC not-for-profit members and all non-members under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial Share Alike 3.0 license and to LDC for-profit members under the terms of the For-Profit Membership Agreement.