LDC January 2024 Newsletter

Renew your LDC membership today 

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

LORELEI Farsi Representative Language Pack

_______________________________________________________________________

Renew your LDC membership today 

The importance of curated resources for language-related education, research and technology development drives LDC’s mission to create them, to accept data contributions from researchers across the globe and to broadly share such resources through the LDC Catalog. 

LDC members enjoy no-cost access to new corpora released annually, as well as the ability to license legacy data sets from among our 950+ holdings 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, 2024, 2023 members receive a 10% discount on 2024 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:

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.

*

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.