Monday, June 22, 2020

LDC 2020 June Newsletter

LDC Releases LORELEI Language Packs for COVID-19 Research


LDC Releases LORELEI Language Packs for COVID-19 Research 

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of data-driven solutions to facilitate rapid response and humanitarian relief, and its global nature demonstrates the need for multi-language resources. To aid in this effort, LDC is releasing data it developed in the DARPA LORELEI program under a special no-cost license for COVID-19 research.

These resources are available in a single corpus:

LDC2020E21 LORELEI Language Packs for COVID-19 Research

This data set includes representative language packs and incident language packs for over two dozen low resource languages, comprising data, annotations, basic natural language processing tools, lexicons and grammatical resources.

For further information about this corpus and licensing terms, see COVID-19 Research.
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New publications: 

(1) CALLFRIEND Mandarin Chinese-Taiwan Dialect Second Edition was developed by LDC and consists of approximately 27 hours of unscripted telephone conversations between native speakers of the Taiwan dialect of Mandarin Chinese. 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 Mandarin Chinese-Taiwan Dialect (LDC96S56).

The CALLFRIEND collection was conducted by LDC in support of language identification technology development. All data in this release 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 Mandarin Chinese-Taiwan Dialect Second Edition is distributed via web download. 

2020 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2020 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) SemTransCNC, developed by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, is a semantic transparency dataset of Chinese nominal compounds built using a series of crowd-based experiments. It contains overall semantic transparency (OST) and constituent semantic transparency (CST) data for 1,176 dimorphemic Chinese nominal compounds, which consist of free morphemes and have mid-range frequencies.

Nominal compounds were selected from the Sinica Corpus and a modern Chinese lexicon. Crowd workers answered questionnaires that included demographic information and questions about the Chinese language. For assessing OST of selected compounds, they answered the question: "How is the sum of the meanings of A and B similar to the meaning of AB?" For assessing CST, they were asked to describe the similarity of A alone to its meaning in AB and the meaning of B alone to its meaning in AB.

SemTransCNC is distributed via web download.

2020 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. 2020 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 English Event Nugget Detection and Coreference - Comprehensive Training and Evaluation Data 2014-2015 was developed by LDC and contains training and evaluation data produced in support of the TAC KBP English Event Nugget Detection and Coreference tasks in 2014 and 2015.

This release includes source documents, gold standard event nugget annotations in multiple formats, coreference information for the nuggets, and tokenized source documents. Source data consists of English newswire and discussion forum text collected by LDC.

The goal of the Event Nugget track was to evaluate system performance on the detection and coreference of sets of attributes referencing events in unstructured text. Event Nuggets consist of a mention of the event from the text and labels to indicate event type, subtype, and realis (whether or not an event has actually occurred).

TAC KBP English Event Nugget Detection and Coreference - Comprehensive Training and Evaluation Data 2014-2015 is distributed via web download.

2020 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2020 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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