Friday, December 16, 2016

LDC December 2016 Newsletter

Renew your LDC membership today
Spring 2017 LDC Data Scholarship Program - deadline approaching
LDC to close for Winter Break
New publications:
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Renew your LDC membership today
Membership Year 2017 (MY2017) is open for joining and discounts are available for those who keep their membership current and join early in the year. Now through March 1, 2017, current MY2016 members who renew before March 1, will receive a 10% discount off of the membership fee. New or returning organizations will receive a 5% discount through March 1. 

In addition to receiving new publications, current year LDC members also enjoy the benefit of licensing older data at reduced costs from our Catalog of almost 700 holdings; current year for-profit members may use most data for commercial applications.
Plans for MY2017 publications are in progress. Among the expected releases are:
  • 2010 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation data set
  • Multilanguage conversational telephone speech: developed to support language identification research in related languages
  • UCLA High Speed Laryngeal Database: audio recordings and high-speed video endoscopic images of the vocal folds while sustaining vowels
  • Noisy TIMIT: TIMIT with added artificial noise
  • CHiME shared task data: noisy read WSJ speech
  • First Year Law Students’ Memoranda: memos to a hypothetical court with annotations
  • IARPA Babel Language Packs: languages include Vietnamese, Haitian Creole, Zulu, Kazakh and Lithuanian
  • BOLT: source, parallel and word-aligned data in all languages
  • RATS Keyword Spotting data set
  • GALE Phases 3 and 4: all tasks and languages    

And don’t forget, MY2016 and MY2015 are still open for joining. MY2015 can be joined through December 31, 2016 and includes data such as RATS Speech Activity Detection and updates to Penn Treebank. MY 2016 will remain open through December 31, 2017 and includes data such as BOLT Chinese Discussion Forums, IARPA Babel Language Packs and Multi-Language Conversational Telephone Speech – Slavic Group. For full descriptions of these data sets, visit our Catalog.  
Visit Join LDC for details on membership, user accounts and payment.

Spring 2017 LDC Data Scholarship Program - deadline approaching
Students can apply for the Spring 2017 Data Scholarship Program now through January 16, 2017, 11:59PM EST. The LDC Data Scholarship program provides undergraduate and graduate students with access to LDC data at no cost.
For more information on application requirements and program rules, please visit LDC Data Scholarships. Students can email their applications to the LDC Data Scholarships program. Decisions will be sent by email from the same address.

LDC to close for Winter Break
LDC will be closed from Monday, December 26, 2016 through Monday, January 2, 2017 in accordance with the University of Pennsylvania Winter Break Policy. Our offices will reopen on Tuesday, January 3, 2017. Requests received for membership renewals and corpora during the Winter Break will not be processed until the week of January 3.

New Corpora

(1) Bamanankan Lexicon was developed by LDC and contains 5,978 entries of the Bamanankan language presented as a Bamanankan-English lexicon and a Bamanankan-French lexicon. It is the third publication in an LDC project to build an electronic dictionary of three Mandekan languages: Mawukakan, Maninkakan and Bamanankan. These are Eastern Manding languages in the Mande Group of the Niger-Congo language family. LDC released a Mawukakan Lexicon (LDC2005L01) in 2005 and a Maninkakan Lexicon (LDC2013L01) in 2013.

This lexicon is presented using a Latin-based transcription system because the Latin alphabet is familiar to the majority of Mandekan language speakers and it is expected to facilitate the work of researchers interested in this resource.

Bamanankan Lexicon is distributed via web download.

2016 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus. 2016 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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(2) IARPA Babel Tagalog Language Pack IARPA-babel106-v0.2g was developed by Appen for the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) Babel program. It contains approximately 213 hours of Tagalog conversational and scripted telephone speech collected in 2012 along with corresponding transcripts.

The Babel program focuses on underserved languages and seeks to develop speech recognition technology that can be rapidly applied to any human language to support keyword search performance over large amounts of recorded speech.

The Tagalog speech in this release represents that spoken in the North, Central and South dialect regions in the Philippines. The gender distribution among speakers is approximately equal; speakers' ages range from 16 years to 65 years. Calls were made using different telephones (e.g., mobile, landline) from a variety of environments including the street, a home or office, a public place, and inside a vehicle.

Transcripts are encoded in UTF-8.

IARPA Babel Tagalog Language Pack IARPA-babel106-v0.2g is distributed via web download.

2016 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. 2016 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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(3) TAC KBP Spanish Cross-lingual Entity Linking - Comprehensive Training and Evaluation Data 2012-2014 was developed by LDC and contains training and evaluation data produced in support of the TAC KBP Spanish Cross-lingual Entity Linking tasks in 2012, 2013 and 2014. It includes queries and gold standard entity type information, Knowledge Base links, and equivalence class clusters for NIL entities along with the source documents for the queries, specifically, English and Spanish newswire, discussion forum and web data. The corresponding knowledge base is available as TAC KBP Reference Knowledge Base (LDC2014T16).

More information about the TAC KBP Entity Linking task and other TAC KBP evaluations can be found on the NIST TAC website.


TAC KBP Spanish Cross-lingual Entity Linking - Comprehensive Training and Evaluation Data 2012-2014 is distributed via web download.

2016 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus. 2016 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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(4) GALE Phase 4 Arabic Newswire Parallel Sentences was developed by LDC and contains Modern Standard Arabic source text and corresponding English translations selected from newswire data collected by LDC in 2008 and translated by LDC or under its direction.

This release includes 393 source-translation document pairs drawn from six distinct newswire sources, comprising 62,669 tokens of Arabic source text and its English translation. Source data and translations are distributed in TDF format. All data is encoded in UTF-8.

GALE Phase 4 Arabic Newswire Parallel sentences is distributed via web download.

2016 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus. 2016 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.


Tuesday, November 15, 2016

LDC November 2016 Newsletter



In this newsletter:

Join LDC for Membership Year 2017
Commercial use and LDC data
Spring 2017 Data Scholarship Program
LDC closed November 24-25 for US Thanksgiving Holiday

New publications:






Join LDC for Membership Year 2017

Organizations engaged in language-related research, education and technology development are invited to join LDC for Membership Year (MY) 2017. Consortium members enjoy unparalleled access and continuing rights to new data releases and to an archive of close to 700 holdings.

Membership fees have not increased for 2017. In addition, discounts are available for organizations who keep their membership current and for those who join before March 1, 2017.

           • MY 2016 members receive a 10% discount if they renew their membership before March 1, 2017. After March 1, MY2016 members receive a 5% discount if they renew their membership any time in 2017.
           • New members and returning former members receive a 5% discount off the membership fee if they join/renew before March 1, 2017.

Plans for MY2017 publications are in progress. Among the expected releases are:

2010 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation data set
Multilanguage conversational telephone speech: developed to support language identification research in related languages
UCLA High Speed Laryngeal Database: audio recordings and high-speed videoendoscopic images of the vocal folds while sustaining vowels
Noisy TIMIT: TIMIT with added artificial noise
CHiME shared task data: noisy read WSJ speech
First Year Law Students’ Memoranda: memos to a hypothetical court with annotations
IARPA Babel Language Packs: languages include Vietnamese, Haitian Creole, Zulu, Kazakh and Lithuanian
BOLT: source, parallel and word-aligned data in all languages
RATS Keyword Spotting data set
GALE Phases 3 and 4: all tasks and languages   

Visit Join LDC for details on membership, user accounts and payment.

Commercial use and LDC data

For-profit organizations are reminded that an LDC membership is a pre-requisite for obtaining a commercial license to almost all LDC databases. Non-member organizations, including non-member for-profit organizations, cannot use LDC data to develop or test products for commercialization, nor can they use LDC data in any commercial product or for any commercial purpose. LDC data users should consult corpus-specific license agreements for limitations on the use of certain corpora. Visit the Licensing page for further information. 

Spring 2017 Data Scholarship Program

Applications are now being accepted through January 15, 2017 for the Spring 2017 LDC Data Scholarship program which provides university students with no-cost access to LDC data. Consult the LDC Data Scholarship page for further information about program rules and submission requirements.

LDC closed November 24-25 for US Thanksgiving Holiday

LDC will be closed on Thursday, November 24, 2016 and Friday, November 25, 2016 in observance of the US Thanksgiving Holiday. The office will reopen on Monday, November 28, 2016.

New Corpora

(1) JANA: A Human-Human Dialogues Corpus for Egyptian Dialect was developed by researchers at Cairo University. This is a special release in addition to the LDC scheduled corpora for membership year 2016, available under separate terms.

This corpus consists of 82 transcribed dialogues from call center inquiries annotated for dialogue acts. Data was collected from call centers for banks, airlines and mobile network providers in the form of spontaneous spoken telephone dialogues (52) and instant messaging dialogues (30) amounting to over 20,000 words.

Not-for-profit organizations may license this data set for a fee under the LDC Not-for-Profit Membership Agreement or under the LDC User Agreement for Non-Members for use in linguistic research, education and non-commercial technology development. For-profit organizations may license this data for a fee under a commercial license.

(2) Multi-Language Conversational Telephone Speech 2011 – Slavic Group was developed by LDC and is comprised of approximately 60 hours of telephone speech in Polish, Russian and Ukrainian. The data was collected to support research and technology evaluation in automatic language identification, specifically language pair discrimination for closely related languages/dialects.

Call were made using LDC’s telephone collection infrastructure. Human auditors labeled calls for gender, dialect type and noise.  Audio data is presented in FLAC-compressed MS-WAV (RIFF) file format. Each uncompressed file is two channels, recorded at 8000 samples/second with samples stored as 16-bit signed integers.

Multi-Language Conversational Telephone Speech 2011 – Slavic Group is distributed via web download.

2016 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus. 2016 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

(3) IARPA Babel Georgian Language Pack IARPA-babel404b-v1.0a was developed by Appen for the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) Babel program. It contains approximately 190 hours of Georgian conversational and scripted telephone speech collected in 2014-2015 along with corresponding transcripts.

The Babel program focuses on underserved languages and seeks to develop speech recognition technology that can be rapidly applied to any human language to support keyword search performance over large amounts of recorded speech.

The Georgian speech in this release represents that spoken in the Eastern and Western dialect regions in Georgia. The gender distribution among speakers is approximately equal; speakers' ages range from 16 years to 73 years. Calls were made using different telephones (e.g., mobile, landline) from a variety of environments including the street, a home or office, a public place, and inside a vehicle.

Transcripts are encoded in UTF-8.

IARPA Babel Georgian Language Pack IARPA-babel404b-v1.0a is distributed via web download.

2016 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. 2016 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

(4) GALE Phase 3 and 4 Chinese Newswire Parallel Text was developed by LDC and contains Chinese source text and corresponding English translations selected from newswire data collected by LDC in 2007-2008 and translated by LDC or under its direction.

This release includes 367 source-translation document pairs drawn from five distinct newswire sources, comprising 210,048 tokens of Chinese source text and its English translation. Source data and translations are distributed in TDF format. All data is encoded in UTF-8.

GALE Phase 3 and 4 Chinese Newswire Parallel Text is distributed via web download.

2016 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus. 2016 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

LDC October 2016 Newsletter



In this newsletter:

Fall 2016 LDC Data Scholarship recipients

Chilin HK and LDC partner on distribution of parallel patent data

New publications:





Fall 2016 LDC Data Scholarship recipients

Congratulations to the recipients of LDC's Fall 2016 data scholarships:

Tiba Zaki Abdulhameed: Western Michigan University (USA); PhD Candidate, Computer Science. Tiba is awarded copies of GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Speech and Transcripts for her research in dialectal ASR.

Abhishek Abhishek: Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (India); PhD Candidate, Computer Science and Engineering. Abhishek is awarded a copies of ACE 2004 Multilingual Training Corpus and The New York Times Annotated Corpus for his research in coreference resolution and relation extraction.

Sara Ebrahim: Ain Shams University (Egypt); Msc, Computer Science. Sara is awarded copies of LDC Standard Arabic Morphological Analyzer and NIST OpenMT 2008 Evaluation Selected References and System Translations for her work in machine translation.

Katherine Metcalf: Indiana University (USA), PhD Candidate, Computer Science. Katherine is awarded a copy of Emotional Prosody Speech and Transcripts for her research in acoustic/prosodic approaches to classifying emotional states.

Mousmita Sarma: Gauhati University (India), Post-Masters Research, Electronics and Communications Technology. Mousmita is awarded copies of Switchboard 1-Release 2 and IARPA Babel Assamese Language Pack for her research in Assamese dialect identification.

For program information visit the Data Scholarship page.


Chilin HK and LDC partner on distribution of parallel patent data

Chilin HK Limited (Chilin) and LDC are pleased to announce that the parallel data source developed by Chilin, A Corpus of Chinese-English Parallel Sentences Extracted from Patents, is now available through the LDC Catalog. This is a special release in addition to the LDC scheduled corpora for membership year 2016, available under separate terms.

The Chilin Corpus has primarily resulted from training corpus and test sets developed specifically for the Tokyo-based NTCIR 2009 & 2010 competitions on Patent MT (machine translation), which drew more than 30 international teams:


The training corpus is drawn from a much larger curated corpus of parallel Chinese-English sentences and sentence fragments which have been winnowed from an even larger corpus of more than 300k parallel Chinese-English patents in different fields, initially at the Research Centre on Language Information Sciences, City University of Hong Kong (authors:  Benjamin Tsou, Bin Lu, and Kapo Chow). This data set is available from LDC under the following reference:


Not-for-profit organizations may license this data set for US$25.00 under the LDC Not-for-Profit Membership Agreement or under the LDC User Agreement for Non-Members for use in linguistic research, education and non-commercial technology development. For-profit organizations may license this data for US$5000, discounted to US$4000 for LDC for-profit members, under a commercial license.

New Corpora

(1) IARPA Babel Turkish Language Pack IARPA-babel105b-v0.5 was developed by Appen for the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) Babel program. It contains approximately 213 hours of Turkish conversational and scripted telephone speech collected in 2012 along with corresponding transcripts.

The Babel program focuses on underserved languages and seeks to develop speech recognition technology that can be rapidly applied to any human language to support keyword search performance over large amounts of recorded speech.

The Turkish speech in this release represents that spoken in seven dialect regions in Turkey. The gender distribution among speakers is approximately equal; speakers' ages range from 16 years to 70 years. Calls were made using different telephones (e.g., mobile, landline) from a variety of environments including the street, a home or office, a public place, and inside a vehicle.

Transcripts are encoded in UTF-8.

IARPA Babel Turkish Language Pack IARPA is distributed via web download.

2016 Subscription Members will receive two copies of this corpus provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. 2016 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

(2) KAFD: Arabic Font Database was developed by King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals and Qassim University. It is comprised of approximately 2.5 million scanned Arabic printed pages in a variety of fonts, sizes and resolutions along with corresponding transcripts. KAFD was designed for research in Arabic text recognition.

The scanned Arabic texts were collected from publications covering various subjects such as religion, medicine, science and history. Texts were printed in 40 different fonts, 10 sizes and four styles. Scans were made at 100, 200, 300 and 600 dpi (dots per inch).

The database is available in two formats: at the page level and at the line level. Images are presented as TIFF images and transcripts are in plain text format. Individual font folders are compressed into RAR archives.

The data is divided into training, validation and test sets.

2016 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus.  2016 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for a fee.

(3) Richer Event Description was developed by the University of Colorado Boulder-CLEAR (Computational Language and Education Research), Carnegie Mellon University and LDC. It consists of coreference, bridging and event-event relations (temporal, causal, subevent and reporting relations) annotations over 95 English newswire, discussion forum and narrative text documents, covering all events, times and non-eventive entities within each document.
RED annotation is intended to join different annotation layers and to provide a rich representation of event phenomena.

Documents were annotated twice -- in a markable pass and in an event annotation phase. Annotation and source documents are divided into three partitions: (1) 20 newswire summarization documents, (2) 20 discussion forum documents and newswire annotations used in the original RED pilot annotations, and (3) 55 documents annotated by a range of DEFT (Deep Exploration and Filtering of Test) annotation formats. Data is presented as UTF-8 encoded xml and plain text.

2016 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus.  2016 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for a fee.