LDC 2021 January Newsletter

Renew Your LDC Membership Today

New Publications:
LORELEI Akan Representative Language Pack
ATIS – Seven Languages
BOLT English Treebank – SMS/Chat

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Renew Your LDC Membership Today 
Curated language resources are more important than ever to support research and language technology development, including the expanding fields around remote work, pandemic-related technologies, and non-contact interactions. LDC members enjoy no-cost access to 30+ new corpora released annually, as well as the ability to license legacy data sets at reduced fees. Ensure that your data needs continue to be met by renewing your LDC membership or by joining the Consortium today. 

Now through March 1, 2021, 2020 members receive a 10% discount on 2021 membership, and new or returning organizations receive a 5% discount. Membership remains the most economical way to access current and past LDC releases. Consult Join LDC for more details on membership options and benefits. 

New publications:

(1) LORELEI Akan Representative Language Pack consists of Akan monolingual text, Akan-English parallel text, annotations, supplemental resources, and related software tools developed by LDC for the DARPA LORELEI program.

The LORELEI (Low Resource Languages for Emergent Incidents) program was concerned with building human language technology for low resource languages in the context of emergent situations like natural disasters or disease outbreaks. Linguistic resources for LORELEI include 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. Representative languages were selected to provide broad typological coverage, while incident languages were selected to evaluate system performance on a language whose identity was disclosed at the start of the evaluation.

Data was collected from discussion forum, news, reference, social network, and weblog. Data volumes are as follows:

• Over 3.3 million words of Akan monolingual text, all of which were translated into English
• 115,000 Akan words translated from English data

Approximately 2,300 words were annotated for named entities, full entity including nominals and pronouns, entity linking, simple semantic annotation, and situation frame annotation (identifying entities, needs, and issues). Around 2,000 words have morphological segmentation annotation.

LORELEI Akan Representative Language Pack is distributed via web download.

2021 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2021 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) ATIS – Seven Languages was developed by Amazon Web Services, Inc. and consists of 5,871 English utterances from ATIS (Air Travel Information Services) corpora, specifically ATIS2 (LDC93S5), ATIS3 Training Data (LDC94S19), and ATIS3 Test Data (LDC95S26), translated into six languages: Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Chinese, and Japanese.

The ATIS collection was developed to support the research and development of speech understanding systems. Participants were presented with various hypothetical travel planning scenarios and asked to solve them by interacting with partially or completely automated ATIS systems. The resulting utterances were recorded and transcribed. Data was collected in the early 1990s at five US sites: Raytheon BBN, Carnegie Mellon University, MIT Laboratory of Computer Science, National Institute for Standards and Technology, and SRI International.

The data is separated into 4,978 utterances for training and 893 utterances for testing following the original ATIS division. The source English utterances were manually translated into the six languages and are included in this release. Each utterance was annotated with named entities via table lookup; markers include city, airline, airport names, and dates.

ATIS Seven Languages is distributed via web download.

2021 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2021 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data at no cost.

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(3) BOLT English Treebank – SMS/Chat was developed by LDC and consists of English SMS and text chat data with part-of-speech and syntactic structure annotation.

The source data consists of 115,667 tokens/words in 484 files of English SMS and text chat collected by LDC using two methods: new collection via LDC's collection platform and donation of SMS or chat archives from BOLT collection participants. 

All data was annotated for word-level tokenization, part-of-speech, and syntactic structure. Annotation conformed to Penn Treebank II style, incorporating changes to those guidelines that were developed under the GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) program. Those changes primarily concerned the tokenization of hyphenated words, part-of-speech, and tree changes necessitated by the tokenization changes, and updates to the syntactic annotation to comply with updated annotation guidelines. Supplementary guidelines for English treebanks and web text are included with this release.

The DARPA BOLT (Broad Operational Language Translation) program developed machine translation and information retrieval for less formal genres, focusing particularly on user-generated content. LDC supported the BOLT program by collecting informal data sources -- discussion forums, text messaging, and chat -- in Chinese, Egyptian Arabic, and English. The collected data was translated and annotated for various tasks including word alignment, treebanking, propbanking and co-reference.

BOLT English Treebank – SMS/Chat is distributed via web download.

2021 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2021 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.