LDC November 2024 Newsletter

Join LDC for membership year 2025  

Spring 2025 data scholarship application deadline  

New publications:

LORELEI Yoruba Representative Language Pack

Samrómur Synthetic

____________________________________________________________________

Join LDC for membership year 2025 
It’s time to renew your LDC membership for 2025. Current (2024) members who renew their membership before March 3, 2025 will receive a 10% discount. New or returning organizations will receive a 5% discount if they join the Consortium by March 3.

In addition to receiving new publications, current LDC members enjoy the benefit of licensing older data from our Catalog of 950+ holdings at reduced fees. Current-year for-profit members may use most data for commercial applications.

Plans for next year’s publications are in progress. Among the expected releases are:  

• Iraqi Arabic – English Lexical Database: a set of six interrelated tables (roots, lemmas, wordforms, multi-word expressions, English definitions, example phrases) presenting each Iraqi Arabic word in Arabic script and IPA format, a result of LDC’s collaboration with Georgetown University Press to enhance and update three dialectal Arabic dictionaries  

• AIDA topic source data and annotations: multimodal source data and annotations in multiple languages (Russian, English, Spanish) for information and entity extraction 

• 2015 NIST Language Recognition Evaluation Test Set: 164,000+ segments of conversational telephone speech and broadcast narrow band speech in six linguistic varieties (Arabic, Spanish, English, Chinese, Slavic, French) representing 20 languages, used in NIST’s 2015 language recognition evaluation 

• BOLT CALLFRIEND CALLHOME CTS audio, transcripts and translations: previously unpublished Chinese and Egyptian Arabic telephone conversations from the CALLFRIEND and CALLHOME collections, with transcripts and translations developed by LDC for the DARPA BOLT program 

• Chinese Sentence Pattern Structure Treebank: 5,000+ sentences from ancient and modern Chinese texts with syntactic annotation based on sentence constituent analysis, developed by Beijing Normal University and Peking University  

• IARPA MATERIAL language packs: conversational telephone speech, transcripts, English translations, annotations and queries in multiple languages (e.g., Georgian, Kazakh, Lithuanian)

• LORELEI: representative and incident language packs containing monolingual text, bi-text, translations, annotations, supplemental resources and related tools in various languages (e.g., Hungarian, Hindi, Amharic, Somali) 

For full descriptions of all LDC data sets, browse our Catalog. Visit Join LDC for details on membership, user accounts and payment.

Spring 2025 data scholarship application deadline
Applications are now being accepted through January 15, 2025 for the Spring 2025 LDC data scholarship program which provides university students with no-cost access to LDC data. Consult the LDC Data Scholarships page for more information about program rules and submission requirements.
 
New publications:

LORELEI Yoruba Representative Language Pack was developed by LDC and is comprised of approximately 7.2 million words of Yoruba monolingual text, 127,000 Yoruba words translated from English data, and 810,000 words of Yoruba-English parallel text. Approximately 77,000 words were annotated for named entities, over 25,000 words were annotated for full entity (including nominals and pronouns) and simple semantic annotation, and around 10,000 words were annotated for noun phrase chunking. 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.

*

Samrómur Synthetic was developed by the Language and Voice Lab, Reykjavik University and contains 72 hours of Icelandic synthetic speech, transcripts and metadata. Source sentences were extracted from the Samrómur platform, comprised of texts and transcripts covering various genres. Text was processed through a text-to-speech system developed by Reykjavik University's Language and Voice Lab to generate speech files. Synthesized speech was created with 44 voices (22 male, 22 female) at four different speed rates for a total of 220 speakers and 62,700 utterances (with 285 sentences/speaker).

2024 members can access this corpus through their LDC accounts provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. Non-members may license this data for a fee.