Fall 2014
Data Scholarship Recipients
Invitation to Join for Membership Year (MY)
2015
Spring 2015 Data Scholarship Program
LDC is now on Twitter
LDC closed
for Thanksgiving Break
New publications:
Boulder Lies and Truth
GALE Chinese-English Word Alignment and Tagging -- Broadcast Training Part 2
GALE Phase 2 Chinese Web Parallel Text
GALE Chinese-English Word Alignment and Tagging -- Broadcast Training Part 2
GALE Phase 2 Chinese Web Parallel Text
LDC is pleased to announce the student
recipients of the Fall 2014 LDC
Data
Scholarship program. The following
students will receive no-cost copies of LDC data:
Mohammed Abumatar ~ University of Jordan (Jordan), Bsc Candidate, Computer Engineering. Mohammed has been awarded a copies of MADCAT Phase 1-3 Training Data for his work in handwriting recognition.
Ramy Baly ~ American University of Beirut (Lebanon), PhD candidate, Electrical and Computer Engineering. Ramy has been awarded a copies of Arabic Treebank Parts 1-3 for his work in opinion mining.
Abbas Khosravanai ~ Amirkabir University of Technology (Iran), PhD candidate, Computer Engineering. Abbas has been awarded a copy of 2008 NIST Speaker Recognition for his work in robust speaker recognition.
Phuc Nguyen ~ University of North Texas (USA), PhD candidate, Computer Science and Engineering. Phuc has been awarded a copy of Message Understanding Conference (MUC) 7 for his work in named entity recognition.
Invitation to Join for Membership Year (MY) 2015
Membership Year (MY) 2015 is open for joining. We would like to invite all current and previous members of LDC to renew their membership as well as welcome new organizations to join the Consortium. For MY2015, LDC is pleased to maintain membership fees at last year’s rates – membership fees will not increase. Additionally, LDC will extend discounts on membership fees to members who keep their membership current and who join early in the year.
The details of our early renewal discounts for MY2015 are as follows:
Organizations who joined for MY2014 will receive a 10% discount when renewing before March 2, 2015. After March 2, 2015, MY2014 members are eligible for a 5% discount when renewing through the end of the year.
New members as well as
organizations who did not join for MY2014, but who held membership
in any of the previous MYs (1993-2013), will also be eligible for
a 5% discount provided that they join/renew before March 2, 2015.
Publications for MY2015 are still being planned but we plan to release the following:
Publications for MY2015 are still being planned but we plan to release the following:
- CIEMPIESS - Mexican Spanish radio broadcast audio and transcripts
- GALE Phase 3 and 4 data – all tasks and languages
- Mandarin Chinese Phonetic Segmentation and Tone Corpus - phonetic segmentation and tone labels
- RATS Speech Activity Detection – multilanguage audio for robust speech detection and language identification
- SEAME - Mandarin-English code-switching speech
- SenSem Spanish and Catalan Lexicon and Databank - sentence semantics and verbal lexicons
Spring
2015
Data Scholarship Program
Applications are now being accepted through
Thursday, January 15, 2015, 11:59PM EST for the Spring 2015 LDC
Data Scholarship program. The LDC Data Scholarship program
provides university students with access to LDC data at no-cost.
During previous program cycles, LDC has awarded no-cost copies of
LDC data to over 40 individual students and student research
groups. This program is open to students pursuing both
undergraduate and graduate studies in an accredited college or
university. LDC Data Scholarships are not restricted to any
particular field of study; however, students must demonstrate a
well-developed research agenda and a bona fide inability to pay.
The application consists of two parts:
(1) Data Use Proposal. Applicants must submit a proposal describing their intended use of the data. The proposal should state which data the student plans to use and how the data will benefit their research project as well as information on the proposed methodology or algorithm.
(2) Letter of Support. Applicants must submit one letter of support from their thesis adviser or department chair. The letter must verify the student's need for data and confirm that the department or university lacks the funding to pay the full non-member fee for the data or to join the Consortium.
For further information on application materials and program rules, please visit the LDC Data Scholarship page.
Students can email their applications to the LDC Data Scholarship program. Decisions will be sent by email from the same address.
The deadline for the Spring 2015 program cycle is January 15, 2015, 11:59PM EST.
LDC is now on Twitter
LDC now has a Twitter feed. Start following us today for updates on new corpora releases and the latest LDC news.
LDC closed for Thanksgiving Break
LDC will be closed on Thursday, November 27, 2014 and Friday, November 28, 2013 in observance of the US Thanksgiving Holiday. Our offices will reopen on Monday, December 1, 2014.
New publications
(1) Boulder Lies and Truth was developed at the University of Colorado Boulder and contains approximately 1,500 elicited English reviews of hotels and electronics for the purpose of studying deception in written language. Reviews were collected by crowd-sourcing with Amazon Medical Turk.
Each review was required to be original and was
checked for plagiarism against the web. Reviews were annotated
with respect to the following three dimensions:
Domain: Electronics (e.g., iPhone) or HotelsSentiment: Positive or Negative
Truth Value:
a) Truthful: a review about an object known
by the writer reflecting the real sentiment of the writer toward
the object of the review
b) Opposition: A review about an object known by the writer reflecting the opposite sentiment of the writer toward the object of the review (i.e., if the writer liked the object they were asked to write a negative review; if the writer did not like the object, they were asked to write a positive review)
c) Deceptive (i.e., fabricated): a review written about an object not known by the writer either positive or negative in sentiment; the objects reviewed were provided via a URL from the tasks in (a) and (b)
Each review was judged a total of 30 times: (1) 10 times to evaluate its perceived quality (on a range from 1-5); (2) 10 times with judgments about its perceived truthfulness (e.g., truthful or somehow deceptive, a lie or a fabrication); and (3) 10 times for its perceived sentiment (i.e., star rating).
Boulder Lies and Truth is distributed via web
download.
2014 Subscription Members will receive two copies of this data on disc, provided they have completed the user license agreement. 2014 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. This data is available at no-cost for non-members under the same user license agreement.
2014 Subscription Members will receive two copies of this data on disc, provided they have completed the user license agreement. 2014 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. This data is available at no-cost for non-members under the same user license agreement.
(2) GALE
Chinese-English Word Alignment and Tagging -- Broadcast Training
Part 2 was developed by LDC and contains 65,069 tokens of
word aligned Chinese and English parallel text enriched with
linguistic tags. This material was used as training data in the
DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) program.
Some approaches to statistical machine
translation include the incorporation of linguistic knowledge in
word aligned text as a means to improve automatic word alignment
and machine translation quality. This is accomplished with two
annotation schemes: alignment and tagging. Alignment identifies
minimum translation units and translation relations by using
minimum-match and attachment annotation approaches. A set of word
tags and alignment link tags are designed in the tagging scheme to
describe these translation units and relations. Tagging adds
contextual, syntactic and language-specific features to the
alignment annotation.
This release consists of Chinese source
broadcast conversation (BC) programming collected by LDC in 2008.
The Chinese word alignment tasks consisted of
the following components:
Identifying, aligning, and tagging eight different types of linksIdentifying, attaching, and tagging local-level unmatched wordsIdentifying and tagging sentence/discourse-level unmatched wordsIdentifying and tagging all instances of Chinese 的(DE) except when they were a part of a semantic link
GALE Chinese-English Word Alignment and Tagging
-- Broadcast Training Part 2 is distributed via web download.
2014 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this data on disc. 2014 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.
2014 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this data on disc. 2014 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.
*
(3) GALE Phase 2
Chinese Web Parallel Text was developed by LDC and along
with other corpora, the parallel text in this release comprised
training data for Phase 2 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous
Language Exploitation) Program. This corpus contains Chinese
source text and corresponding English translations selected from
weblog and newsgroup data collected by LDC and translated by LDC
or under its direction.
This release includes 46 source-translation
document pairs, comprising 66,779 tokens of translated data. Data
is drawn from four Chinese weblog and newsgroup sources.
Data was manually selected for translation
according to several criteria, including linguistic features and
topic features. The files were formatted into a human-readable
translation format and assigned to translation vendors.
Translators followed LDC's Chinese to English translation
guidelines. Bilingual LDC staff performed quality control
procedures on the completed translations.
2014 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this data on disc. 2014 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.