Thursday, August 15, 2019

LDC 2019 August Newsletter

Fall 2019 LDC Data Scholarship Program 

New Publications:

TAC KBP Evaluation Source Corpora 2016-2017 
__________________________________________________________________ 

Fall 2019 LDC Data Scholarship Program 

Students can apply for the Fall 2019 LDC Data Scholarship program now through September 15, 2019. This scholarship program provides eligible students with access to LDC data at no cost. For application requirements and program rules, please visit the LDC Data Scholarship page. 


New publications: 

(1) Corpus of Conversational Persian Transcripts contains transcripts from approximately 20 hours of naturally occurring informal conversations in the Tehrani dialect of Iranian Persian.

This data set is extracted from 1,201 minutes of conversations among 22 participants (12 male and 10 female) who recorded their daily phone calls and face-to-face interactions in a variety of informal settings. Conversations represent various interaction types (dialogue and group conversation), settings (home, office, car, café and restaurant), types of relationship (family, couple, friend, acquaintance), and various communicative goals (joking, explaining, arguing, and complaining, among others). The corresponding speech is not included in this release.

The transcripts were annotated for gender, age, and recording method and setting.

Corpus of Conversational Persian Transcripts is distributed via web download.

2019 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2019 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

*

(2) TAC KBP Evaluation Source Corpora 2016-2017 was developed by LDC and contains the 180,003 Chinese, English and Spanish source documents used in support of all TAC KBP evaluation tracks conducted in 2016 and 2017.

The source data consists of Chinese, English and Spanish discussion forum and newswire text collected by LDC. Also provided are a series of lists and tables to aid in the recreation of specific test sets.

Text Analysis Conference (TAC) is a series of workshops organized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), developed to encourage research in natural language processing and related applications. The Knowledge Base Population (KBP) track of TAC encourages the development of systems that can match entities mentioned in natural texts with those appearing in a knowledge base and extract novel information about entities from a document collection and add it to a new or existing knowledge base. 

TAC KBP Evaluation Source Corpora 2016-2017 is distributed via web download.

2019 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2019 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

*

(3) Multi-Language Conversational Telephone Speech 2011 -- East Asian was developed by LDC and is comprised of approximately 19 hours of telephone speech in two distinct languages of East Asia: Thai and Lao.

The data were collected primarily to support research and technology evaluation in automatic language identification, and portions of these telephone calls were used in the NIST 2011 Language Recognition Evaluation (LRE). Participants were recruited by native speakers who contacted acquaintances in their social network. Those native speakers made one call, up to 15 minutes, to each acquaintance. Calls are labeled by human auditors for callee gender, dialect type, and noise.  

LDC has also released the following as part of the Multi-Language Conversational Telephone Speech 2011 series:

Multi-Language Conversational Telephone Speech 2011 -- East Asian is distributed via web download. 

2019 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2019 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

*

(4) IARPA Babel Igbo Language Pack IARPA-babel306b-v2.0c was developed by Appen for the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) Babel program. It contains approximately 207 hours of Igbo conversational and scripted telephone speech collected in 2014 and 2015 along with corresponding transcripts.

The Igbo speech in this release represents the Owerri, Onitsha, and Ngwa dialects spoken in Nigeria. The gender distribution among speakers is approximately equal; speakers' ages range from 16 years to 67 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.

IARPA Babel Igbo Language Pack IARPA-babel306b-v2.0c is distributed via web download.

2019 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. 2019 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

*