Friday, November 15, 2019

LDC 2019 November Newsletter

Join LDC for Membership Year 2020
Spring 2020 Data Scholarship Program
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Join LDC for Membership Year 2020 

Membership Year 2020 (MY2020) is open and discounts are available for those who keep their membership current and join early in the year. Now through March 2, 2020, current MY2019 members who renew their LDC membership before March 2 will receive a 10% discount off the membership fee. New or returning organizations will receive a 5% discount through March 2.

In addition to receiving new publications, current LDC members also enjoy the benefit of licensing older data at reduced costs from our Catalog of over 800 holdings. Current-year for-profit members may use most data for commercial applications.

Plans for MY2020 publications are in progress. Among the expected releases are: 

Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) Annotation Release 3.0: semantic treebank of over 59,000 English natural language sentences from broadcast conversations, newswire, weblogs and web discussion forums; updates the second version (LDC2017T10) with new annotations 
TAC KBP: English sentiment slot filling, surprise slot filling, nugget detection and coreference, and event argument data in all languages (English, Chinese and Spanish) 
DEFT Chinese ERE: Chinese discussion forum data annotated for entities, relations and events 
LibriVox Spanish: 73 hours of Spanish audiobook read speech and transcripts
IARPA Babel Language Packs (telephone speech and transcripts): languages include Dhuluo, Javanese and Mongolian 
HAVIC Med Training data: web video, metadata, and annotations for developing multimedia systems 
RATS Speaker Identification: conversational telephone speech in Levantine Arabic, Pashto, Urdu, Farsi and Dari on degraded audio signals with annotation of speech segments for speaker identification 
BOLT: discussion forums, SMS/chat, conversational telephone speech, word-aligned, tagged and co-reference data in all languages (Chinese, Egyptian Arabic, and English) 

It’s also not too late to join for MY2018 (through December 31, 2019) and MY2019 (through December 31, 2020). Data sets from those years include Concretely Annotated New York Times and English Gigaword, DIRHA English WSJ Audio, BOLT English Treebank – Discussion Forum, First DIHARD Challenge Development and Evaluation releases, Penn Discourse Treebank Version 3.0, and 2016 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set. 

For full descriptions of all LDC data sets, browse our Catalog.

Visit Join LDC for details on membership, user accounts and payment. 

Spring 2020 Data Scholarship Program 

Applications are now being accepted through January 15, 2020 for the Spring 2020 LDC Data Scholarship program which provides university students with no-cost access to LDC data. Consult the LDC Data Scholarship page for more information about program rules and submission requirements.
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New publications: 

(1) DEFT English Committed Belief Annotation was developed by LDC and consists of approximately 950,000 words of English discussion forum text annotated for "committed belief," which marks the level of commitment displayed by the author to the truth of the propositions expressed in the text.

DARPA's Deep Exploration and Filtering of Text (DEFT) program aimed to address remaining capability gaps in state-of-the-art natural language processing technologies related to inference, causal relationships and anomaly detection. LDC supported the DEFT program by collecting, creating and annotating a variety of data sources.

DEFT English Committed Belief Annotation 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.

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(2) CALLFRIEND American English-Non-Southern Dialect Second Edition was developed by LDC and consists of approximately 26 hours of unscripted telephone conversations between native speakers of non-Southern dialects of American English. This second edition updates the audio files to wav format, simplifies the directory structure and adds documentation and metadata. The first edition is available as CALLFRIEND American English-Non-Southern Dialect (LDC96S46).

All data was collected before July 1997. Participants could speak with a person of their choice on any topic; most called family members and friends. All calls originated in North America. The recorded conversations last up to 30 minutes. 

CALLFRIEND American English-Non-Southern Dialect Second Edition 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. 

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(3) TAC KBP Cold Start - Comprehensive Evaluation Data 2012-2017 was developed by LDC and contains Chinese, English and Spanish data produced in support of the TAC KBP Cold Start evaluation track conducted from 2012 to 2017. This corpus includes source documents, queries, assessments, manual runs and final assessments. 

In the Cold Start track, systems were evaluated on their ability to construct a new knowledge base (KB) from information provided in a text collection in combination with technologies developed in other TAC KBP tracks -- slot filling, information extraction, question answering and entity discovery and linking. Cold Start systems were required to find all entities in the text, and the KB must have ideally included every person, organization, and geo-political entity as well as all the targeted relations between them. To facilitate the evaluation of those KBs, LDC annotators created sets of queries, human-generated responses to the queries, and assessments of both human and system responses. 

The source data in this release is comprised of English and Spanish newswire and web text collected by LDC for the 2012, 2014 and 2015 evaluations and the 2016 pilot collection. The source collections for the 2016 and 2017 evaluations, which include Chinese data, are available in TAC KBP Evaluation Source Corpora 2016-2017 (LDC2019T12). The archived 2013 Cold Start source data collection is available from NIST upon request.

TAC KBP Cold Start - Comprehensive Evaluation Data 2012-2017 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. 

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(4) IARPA Babel Amharic Language Pack IARPA-babel307b-v1.0b was developed by Appen for the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) Babel program. It contains approximately 204 hours of Amharic conversational and scripted telephone speech collected in 2014 along with corresponding transcripts.

The Amharic speech in this release represents the Addis Ababa, Shewa, and Gondar dialect regions of Ethiopia. The gender distribution among speakers is approximately equal; speakers' ages range from 16 years to 60 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 Amharic Language Pack IARPA-babel307b-v1.0b 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.