New publications:
Spring
2013 LDC Data Scholarship Recipients!
LDC is pleased to announce the student
recipients of the Spring 2013 LDC Data Scholarship program! This
program provides university students with access to LDC data at
no-cost. Students were asked to complete an application which
consisted of a proposal describing their intended use of the data,
as well as a letter of support from their thesis adviser. We
received many solid applications and have chosen three proposals
to support. The following students will receive no-cost copies
of LDC data:
Salima Harrat - Ecole SupĂ©rieure d’informatique (ESI) (Algeria). Salima has been awarded a copy of Arabic Treebank: Part 3 for her work in diacritization restoration.
Maulik C. Madhavi - Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DA-IICT), Gandhinagar (India). Maulik has been awarded a copy of Switchboard Cellular Part 1 Transcribed Audio and Transcripts and 1997 HUB4 English Evaluation Speech and Transcripts for his work in spoken term detection.
Shereen M. Oraby - Arab Academy for Science, Technology, and Maritime Transport (Egypt). Shereen has been awarded a copy of Arabic Treebank: Part 1 for her work in subjectivity and sentiment analysis.
Please join us in congratulating our student
recipients! The next LDC Data Scholarship program is scheduled
for the Fall 2013 semester.
Time is quickly running out to save on
membership fees for Membership Year 2013 (MY2013)! Any
organization which joins or renews membership for 2013 through
Friday, March 1, 2013, is entitled to a 5% discount on membership
fees. Organizations which held membership for MY2012 can receive
a 10% discount on fees provided they renew prior to March 1, 2013.
Many publications for MY2013 are still in
development. The planned publications for the upcoming months
include:
GALE data ~ continuing releases of all languages (Arabic, Chinese, English), genres (Broadcast News, Broadcast Conversation, Newswire and Web Data) and tasks (Parallel Text, Word Alignment, Parallel Aligned Treebanks, Parallel Sentences, Audio and Transcripts).
Hispanic Accented English Database ~ 30 hours of conversational speech data from non-native speakers of English with approximately 24 hours or 80% of the data closely transcribed. The speech in this release was collected from 22 non-native, Hispanic speakers of English and consists of spontaneous speech and read utterances. The read speech is divided equally between English and Spanish.
NIST 2012 Open Machine Translation Progress Tests ~ contains the evaluation sets (source data and human reference translations), DTD, scoring software, and evaluation plan for the OpenMT12 test for Arabic, Chinese, Dari, Farsi, and Korean to English on a parallel data set. This set is based on a subset of the Arabic-to-English and Chinese-to-English Progress tests from the NIST Open Machine Translation 2008, 2009, and 2012 evaluations with new source data created based on the English human reference translation reference. The original data consists of newswire and web data.
NIST Open Machine Translation 2008 to 2012 Progress Test Sets ~ contains the evaluation sets (source data and human reference translations), DTD, scoring software, and evaluation plans for the Arabic-to-English and Chinese-to-English Progress tests of the NIST Open Machine Translation 2008, 2009, and 2012 Evaluations. The test sets consist of newswire and web data.
OntoNotes 5.0 ~ multiple genres of English, Chinese, and Arabic text annotated for syntax, predicate argument structure and shallow semantics.
UN Parallel Text ~ contains the text of United Nations parliamentary documents in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish from 1993 through 2007. The data is provided in two formats: (1) raw text: the raw text is very close to what was extracted from the word processing documents, converted to UTF-8 encoding, and (2) word-aligned text: the word-aligned text has been normalized, tokenized, aligned at the sentence-level, further broken into sub-sentential "chunk-pairs", and then aligned at the word-level.
2013
Subscription Members are automatically sent all MY2013 data as it
is released. 2013 Standard Members are entitled to request 16
corpora for free from MY2013. Non-members may license most data
for research use. Visit our Announcements
page for information on pricing.
The LDC blog has a new podcast in LDC’s 20th Anniversary series. This edition features LDC’s Executive Director, Christopher Cieri. In this podcast, Chris reflects on the road that took him to LDC, some of his early responsibilities and recent consortium activities.
Click here for Chris’ podcast. Other podcasts will be published via the LDC blog , so stay tuned to that space.
New publications
(1) GALE
Phase
2 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Speech Part 1 was developed
by LDC and is comprised of approximately 123 hours of Arabic
broadcast conversation speech collected in 2006 and 2007 by LDC as
part of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation)
Program. Broadcast audio for the DARPA GALE program was collected
at LDC’s Philadelphia, PA USA facilities and at three remote
collection sites.
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.
LDC's local broadcast collection system is
highly automated, easily extensible and robust and capable of
collecting, processing and evaluating hundreds of hours of content
from several dozen sources per day. The broadcast material is
served to the system by a set of free-to-air (FTA) satellite
receivers, commercial direct satellite systems (DSS) such as
DirecTV, direct broadcast satellite (DBS) receivers, and cable
television (CATV) feeds. The mapping between receivers and
recorders is dynamic and modular; all signal routing is performed
under computer control, using a 256x64 A/V matrix switch. Programs
are recorded in a high bandwidth A/V format and are then processed
to extract audio, to generate keyframes and compressed
audio/video, to produce time-synchronized closed captions (in the
case of North American English) and to generate automatic speech
recognition (ASR) output.
The broadcast conversation recordings in this
release feature interviews, call-in programs and round table
discussions focusing principally on current events from several
sources. This release contains 143 audio files presented in .wav,
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 LDCs 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 Conversation Speech Part 1 is distributed on 4 DVDs. 2013 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this data. 2013 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.
GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Speech Part 1 is distributed on 4 DVDs. 2013 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this data. 2013 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.
*
(2) GALE
Phase
2 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Transcripts - Part 1 was
developed by LDC and contains transcriptions of approximately 123
hours of Arabic broadcast conversation speech collected in 2006
and 2007 by LDC, MediaNet, Tunis, Tunisia and MTC, Rabat, Morocco
during Phase 2 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language
Exploitation) program. The source broadcast conversation
recordings feature interviews, call-in programs and round table
discussions focusing principally on current events from several
sources.
The transcript files are in plain-text,
tab-delimited format (TDF) with UTF-8 encoding, and the
transcribed data totals 752,747 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 LDCs 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 Conversation
Transcripts - Part 1 is distributed via web download. 2013 Subscription Members will automatically
receive two copies of this data on disc. 2013 Standard Members
may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.
*
(3) NIST
2012 Open Machine Translation (OpenMT) Evaluation was
developed by NIST
Multimodal Information Group. This release contains source
data, reference translations and scoring software used in the NIST
2012 OpenMT evaluation, specifically, for the Chinese-to-English
language pair track. The package was compiled and scoring software
was developed at NIST, making use of Chinese newswire and web data
and reference translations collected and developed by LDC. The
objective of the OpenMT evaluation series is to support research
in, and help advance the state of the art of, machine translation
(MT) technologies -- technologies that translate text between
human languages. Input may include all forms of text. The goal is
for the output to be an adequate and fluent translation of the
original.
The 2012 task was to evaluate five language
pairs: Arabic-to-English, Chinese-to-English, Dari-to-English,
Farsi-to-English and Korean-to-English. This release consists of
the material used in the Chinese-to-English language pair track.
For more general information about the NIST OpenMT evaluations,
please refer to the NIST OpenMT
website.
This evaluation kit includes a single Perl
script (mteval-v13a.pl) that may be used to produce a translation
quality score for one (or more) MT systems. The script works by
comparing the system output translation with a set of (expert)
reference translations of the same source text. Comparison is
based on finding sequences of words in the reference translations
that match word sequences in the system output translation.
This release contains 222 documents with
corresponding source and reference files, the latter of which
contains four independent human reference translations of the
source data. The source data is comprised of Chinese newswire and
web data collected by LDC in 2011. A portion of the web data
concerned the topic of food and was treated as a restricted
domain. The table below displays statistics by source, genre,
documents, segments and source tokens.
Source
|
Genre
|
Documents
|
Segments
|
Source Tokens
|
Chinese General
|
Newswire
|
45
|
400
|
18184
|
Chinese General
|
Web Data
|
28
|
420
|
15181
|
Chinese Restricted Domain
|
Web Data
|
149
|
2184
|
48422
|
The token counts for Chinese data are
"character" counts, which were obtained by counting tokens
matching the UNICODE-based regular expression "/w". The Python
“re” module was used to obtain those counts.
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