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:

JANA: A Human-Human Dialogues Corpus for Egyptian Dialect

Multi-Language Conversational Telephone Speech 2011 – Slavic Group

IARPA Babel Georgian Language Pack IARPA-babel404b-v1.0a

GALE Phase 3 and 4 Chinese Newswire Parallel Text

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.