Tuesday, January 16, 2024

LDC January 2024 Newsletter

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New publications:
 
KASET – Kurmanji and Sorani Kurdish Speech and Transcripts

LORELEI Farsi Representative Language Pack

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New publications:

KASET - Kurmanji and Sorani Kurdish Speech and Transcripts consists of 147 hours of telephone conversations (289 recordings) and broadcast news (410 recordings) in two Kurdish dialects: Kurmanji Kurdish and Sorani Kurdish along with transcripts covering 60 hours of those recordings. Kurdish is spoken primarily in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Sorani and Kurmanji are the two widely spoken dialects of the Kurdish language.

The telephone speech was generated from calls by native Kurdish speakers in the United States to North American acquaintances in their social network. The broadcast news audio was collected from multiple streaming radio and television broadcast programs (narrowband and wideband audio), many of which contained a mix of Kurmanji and Sorani Kurdish. Native speaker auditors identified a 5-10 minute span from each broadcast recording for transcription. 

Full telephone recordings that passed the native speaker audit were transcribed. This release includes speaker information, such as gender, year of birth, and language.

2024 members can access this corpus through their LDC accounts. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

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LORELEI Farsi Representative Language Pack was developed by LDC and is comprised of approximately 250 million words of Farsi monolingual text, 120,000 Farsi words translated from English data, and 751,000 words of found Farsi-English parallel text. Approximately 75,000 words were annotated for named entities and up to 22,000 words were annotated for entity discovery and linking and situation frames (identifying entities, needs and issues). Data was collected from discussion forum, news, reference, social network, and weblogs.

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. Representative languages were selected to provide broad typological coverage.

The knowledge base for entity linking annotation is available separately as LORELEI Entity Detection and Linking Knowledge Base (LDC2020T10).

2024 members can access this corpus through their LDC accounts. Non-members may license this data for a fee.