LDC 2021 February Newsletter

2021 Membership Discounts Expire March 1 

New Publications:
Althingi Parliamentary Speech
Penn Discourse Treebank 2.0 – German Translation 
TAC-KBP English Surprise Slot Filling – Comprehensive Training and Evaluation Data 2010
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2021 Membership Discounts Expire March 1

Time is running out to save on 2021 membership fees. Renew your LDC membership, rejoin the Consortium, or become a new member by March 1 to receive a discount of up to 10%. For more information on membership benefits and options, visit Join LDC. 

New publications:

(1) Althingi Parliamentary Speech consists of approximately 540 hours of recorded speech from Althingi, the Icelandic Parliament, along with corresponding transcripts, a pronunciation dictionary, and language models. Speeches date from 2005-2016. This data set was collected in 2016 by the ASR for Althingi project at Reykjavik University in collaboration with the Althingi speech department. The purpose of that project was to develop an ASR (automatic speech recognition) system for Icelandic parliamentary speech to replace the procedure of manually transcribing performed speeches. 

The mean speech length is 6 minutes, with speeches ranging from under 1 minute up to around 30 minutes. The corpus features 197 speakers (105 male, 92 female) and is split into training, development, and evaluation sets. 

Althingi Parliamentary Speech is distributed via web download.

2021 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. 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) Penn Discourse Treebank 2.0 – German Translation  was developed at the University of Potsdam’s Applied Computational Linguistics group and consists of approximately one million tokens derived from Penn Discourse Treebank Version 2.0 (LDC2008T05) translated into German and annotated for shallow discourse relations. The aim of the Penn Discourse Treebank  project is to annotate the Wall Street Journal section in Treebank-2 (LDC95T7) with discourse relations. PDTB-German is based on a subset of PDTB2.0 used in the 2016 CoNLL Shared Task on Multilingual Shallow Discourse Parsing.

Data is in CoNLL format. Text was automatically translated with deepL, and projections of the annotations using word alignments were produced with GIZA++.

Penn Discourse Treebank 2.0 – German Translation 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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(3) TAC-KBP English Surprise Slot Filling – Comprehensive Training and Evaluation Data 2010 contains the training and evaluation data (queries, manual runs, final assessment results) produced by LDC to support the 2010 Surprise Slot Filling Track, the only year in which the track was run. 

The regular English Slot Filling track involved mining information about entities from text using a specified set of "slots" or attributes. The goal of the Surprise Slot Filling task was to support the development of information extraction systems that could rapidly adapt to new types of relations and events. Surprise Slot Filling participants were given four new slot types -- "diseases", "awards-won" and "charity-supported" for persons, and "products" for organizations -- along with annotation guidelines and training data. They were instructed to develop their systems and to run them on the source collection in four days.

The corresponding source document collections cover English newswire, broadcast material, and web text. These documents  are included in TAC KBP Comprehensive English Source Corpora 2009-2014 (LDC2018T03). The corresponding Knowledge Base (KB) for much of the data - a 2008 snapshot of Wikipedia - is contained in TAC KBP Reference Knowledge Base (LDC2014T16) .

TAC-KBP English Surprise Slot Filling – Comprehensive Training and Evaluation Data 2010 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.