Wednesday, December 15, 2021

LDC December 2021 Newsletter

LDC 2022 Membership Discounts Now Available 

Approaching Deadline for Spring 2022 Data Scholarship Applications 

Citizen Linguistics

LDC Closed for Winter Break Dec. 24-Jan. 4


New Publications:

LDC 2022 Membership Discounts Now Available  
Now through March 1, 2022, current 2021 members receive a 10% discount for renewing their membership, and new or returning organizations receive a 5% discount. Membership remains the most economical way to access current and past LDC releases. Consult Join LDC for details on membership options and benefits. 

Approaching Deadline for Spring 2022 Data Scholarship Applications
Attention students: don’t miss out on the chance to receive no-cost access to LDC data for your research. Applications for Spring 2022 data scholarships are due January 15, 2022. For more information on requirements and program rules, see LDC Data Scholarships

Citizen Linguistics
LanguageARC (https://languagearc.com), a citizen science web portal for linguistics, continues to grow with 12 language research projects currently available to the community. Two new projects seeking contributions from citizen linguists have recently been added. The Fearless Steps project will make thousands of hours of Apollo space mission communications accessible to researchers and to the public. Contributors can listen to and annotate actual audio recordings from the Apollo 11 space mission. A second new project, Les stéréotypes en français, asks contributors to identify and classify stereotypes that can be expressed in the French language. In addition to these publicly available projects, LanguageARC also enables researchers to create research projects restricted to defined private groups, such as the recent object naming task to document the Guanzhong dialect of Mandarin. Here a private, invited group of about 60 contributors yielded over 34,000 speech recordings.

Please consider becoming an active participant in the LanguageARC community by contributing to research projects. If you are a researcher interested in creating your own project on LanguageARC, please reach out via the “Contact” page on the website.

LDC Closed for Winter Break Dec. 24-Jan. 4
LDC will be closed from Friday December 24, 2021 through Tuesday, January 4, 2022 in accordance with the University of Pennsylvania Winter Break Policy. Our offices will reopen on Wednesday, January 5, 2022. Requests received by the Membership Office during Winter Break will be processed when the office reopens. 

New publications:

(1) BOLT English Translation Treebank – Chinese SMS/Chat was developed by LDC and consists of SMS/Chat text data translated from Chinese to English and annotated for part-of-speech and syntactic structure.  

The source data is Chinese SMS and chat text collected by LDC between 2010 and 2013. A subset of the translated text -- 194 files representing 108,385 tokens -- was selected for treebanking. Part-of-speech and treebank annotation conform to Penn Treebank II style. Supplementary guidelines for English treebanks and web text are included with this release.

BOLT English Translation Treebank – Chinese 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.

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(2) HAVIC MED Training Data – Videos, Metadata and Annotation was developed by LDC and is comprised of approximately 2,100 hours of user-generated videos with annotation and metadata developed for the 2011-2015 NIST-sponsored MED (Multimedia Event Detection) tasks.

The data consists of videos of various events (event videos) and videos completely unrelated to events (background videos) harvested by a large team of human annotators. Each event video was manually annotated with judgments describing its event properties and other salient features. Background videos were labeled with topic and genre categories.

HAVIC MED Training Data -- Videos, Metadata and Annotation 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. This corpus is a members-only release and is not available for non-member licensing. Contact ldc@ldc.upenn.edu for information about membership.