Thursday, October 14, 2021

LDC October 2021 Newsletter

Fall 2021 data scholarship recipients 

Membership Year 2022 publication preview

LDC data and commercial technology development  


New Publications: 

BOLT Egyptian Arabic Treebank – SMS/Chat 

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Fall 2021 data scholarship recipients 

Congratulations to the recipients of LDC's Fall 2021 data scholarships: 

Sophia Minnillo: University of California, Davis (USA); PhD, Linguistics. Sophia is awarded a copy of ETS Corpus of Non-Native Written English LDC2014T06 for her research on the use of transition markers by Chinese L1 speakers. 
 
Jagabandhu Mishra: Indian Institute of Technology Dharwad (India); Research Scholar, Electrical Engineering. Jagabandhu is awarded a copy of Mandarin-English Code-Switching in South-East Asia LDC2015S04 for his work in spoken language diarization 
 
Kashyap Patel: University of Texas at Dallas (USA); Ph.D., Electrical Engineering. Kashyap is awarded copies of CSR-I (WSJ0) Sennheiser LDC93S6B and CSR-II (WSJ1) Sennheiser LDC94S13B for his research in audio, acoustic and speech signal processing. 
 
Yoshani Ranaweera, D. Dissanayaka, S. Sudasinghe: University of Moratuwa (Sri Lanka); Bachelors, Computer Science and Engineering. This group is awarded a copy of CALLHOME American English Speech LDC97S4 for their work in speaker diarization 
 
Winie Wong: University of Illinois at Chicago (USA); PhD, Electrical and Computer Engineering. Winie is awarded copies of ISI Chinese-English Automatically Extracted Parallel Text LDC2007T09 and GALE Phase 3 and 4 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text LDC2016T15 for her research in machine translation.  
 
For information about the program, visit the Data Scholarships page. 


Membership Year 2022 publication preview 

The 2022 Membership Year is approaching and plans for next year’s publications are in progress. Among the expected releases are: 

  • 2017 NIST OpenSAT Pilot – SSSF: real world operational English speech data, transcripts and annotation files used in the speech activity detection, automatic speech recognition, and keyword search tasks of the 2017 OpenSAT Pilot evaluation 
  • AttImam2000 attribution relations applied to Arabic newswire text from Arabic Treebank: Part 1 v 4.1 LDC2010T13 
  • Samrómur Icelandic Speech: 145 hours of Icelandic prompted speech from 8000 speakers covering text from novels, news, plays, and location names 
  • MASRI Synthetic: 99 hours of synthesized Maltese speech from various genres with transcripts  
  • HAVIC MED Novel Tests: thousands of hours of event and background user-generated videos with annotation and metadata used for the 2015 Multimedia Event Detection task 
  • DIHARD Challenges: development and evaluation data from the second and third DIHARD evaluations, a set of shared tasks focusing on speech diarization for challenging data 
  • LORELEI: representative and incident language packs containing monolingual text, bi-text, translations, annotations, supplementaresources and related tools (Kinyarwanda, Wolof) 


Check your inbox in the coming weeks for more information about membership renewal.  


LDC data and commercial technology development 

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. 



New publications: 

(1) UCLA Variability Speaker Database was developed by UCLA Speech Processing and Auditory Perception Laboratory and is comprised of approximately 34 hours of English speech and orthographic transcripts. Speakers (101 female, 101 male) took part in six tasks: vowel sounds, reading sentences, giving instructions, neutral conversation, happy conversation, a phone conversation, annoyed conversation, and responding to a video. This corpus was designed to sample variability in speaking within individual speakers and across a large number of speakers.  


UCLA Variability Speaker Database is distributed via web download.   


2021 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2021 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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(2BOLT Egyptian Arabic Treebank – SMS/Chat was developed by LDC and consists of Egyptian Arabic SMS/Chat data with part-of-speech annotation, morphology, and syntactic tree annotation. This release contains 349,414 tokens before clitics were split and 435,677 tree tokens after clitics were split for treebank annotation. The source data was collected by LDC from its collection platform or by donation and was manually reviewed to exclude material not in the target language or with sensitive content. Originally written in Arabizi (Romanized/Latin characters) script, the source SMS/chat text was transliterated to Arabic script and manually corrected prior to treebank annotation. Annotations followed Penn Arabic Treebank guidelines. 

 

BOLT Egyptian Arabic Treebank – SMS/Chat is distributed via web download.  

 

2021 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2021 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee