LDC October 2024 Newsletter

LDC/Penn receives US Dept of Education research grant 

Membership year 2025 publication preview 

Fall 2024 data scholarship recipients 

New publications:

RST Continuity Corpus

MultiTACRED

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LDC/Penn receives US Dept of Education research grant 
LDC and Penn’s Graduate School of Education and Department of Computer and Information Science are part of a team that was recently awarded a $10 million grant from the US Department of Education to develop the Using Generative Artificial Intelligence for Reading R&D Center (U-GAIN Reading) which will explore using generative AI to improve elementary school reading instruction for English learners. Led by the education nonprofit Digital Promise, U-GAIN Reading will build on an existing research-based tutoring platform, Amira Learning, that is used by more than 1 million students each year. The LDC/Penn team will contribute expertise in computational linguistics, computer science, and learning analytics. An evaluation team at MDRC will measure learner outcomes both to improve the R&D and to benchmark its eventual impacts. Additional experts in the science of reading, ethics, and strategies for national impact will support the project’s work. Data developed in the project will be shared with the community through the LDC Catalog.

Membership year 2025 publication preview 
The 2025 membership year is approaching and 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• BOLT CALLFRIEND CALLHOME CTS Audio, Transcripts and Translations: previously unpublished Chinese and Egyptian Arabic telephone conversations from the CALLFRIEND and CALLHOME collections, with transcripts and translations developed by LDC for the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) 

Check your inbox for more information about membership renewal.

Fall 2024 data scholarship recipients 
Congratulations to the recipients of LDC's Fall 2024 data scholarships:

Yomma Gamaleldin: Alexandria University (Egypt): Master’s student, Computer and Systems Engineering Department. Yomma is awarded a copy of Qatari Corpus of Argumentative Writing LDC2022T04 for her work in Arabic automated essay scoring.

Arhane Mahaganapathy: Jaffna University (Sri Lanka): Master’s student, Department of Computer Science. Ahrane is awarded copies of IARPA Babel Tamil Language Pack LDC2017S13 and Multi-Language Telephone Speech 2011 – South Asian LDC2017S14 for her work in Tamil speech-to-text systems.

Sivashanth Suthakar: Jaffna University (Sri Lanka): Master’s student, Department of Computer Science. Sivashanth is awarded copies of CAMIO Transcription Languages LDC2022T07 and LORELEI Tamil Representative Language Pack LDC2023T03 for his work in Tamil OCR systems.

Oshan Yalegama: University of Moratuwa (Sri Lanka): BSc, Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering. Oshan is awarded copies of CSR-I (WSJ0) Complete LDC93S6A and TIMIT Acoustic-Phonetic Continuous Speech Corpus LDC93S1 for his work in audio signal processing.

Samer Mohammed Yaseen: Sana’a University (Yemen): PhD candidate, Faculty of Computer and Information Technology. Samer is awarded a copy of Arabic Newswire Part 1 LDC2001T55 for his work in Arabic information retrieval. 

New publications:

RST Continuity Corpus was developed at Åbo Akademi University and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and contains annotations for continuity dimensions added to RST Discourse Treebank (LDC2002T07). RST Discourse Treebank is a collection of English news texts from the Penn Treebank annotated for rhetorical relations under the RST (Rhetorical Structure Theory) framework. In RST Continuity Corpus, the relations are annotated for the seven continuity dimensions: time, space, reference, action, perspective, modality, and speech act. The relations are also annotated for polarity, order of segments, nuclearity, and context.

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

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MultiTACRED was developed by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) Speech and Language Technology Lab and is a machine translation of TAC Relation Extraction Dataset (LDC2018T24) (TACRED) into twelve languages with projected entity annotations. TACRED is a large-scale relation extraction dataset containing 106,264 examples built over English newswire and web text used in the NIST TAC KBP English slot filling evaluations during the period 2009-2014. The training and evaluation data for the TAC KBP slot filling tasks was developed by the Linguistic Data Consortium.

TACRED training, development and test splits were translated into Arabic, Chinese, Finnish, French, German, Hindi,  Hungarian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish using  DeepL or Google Translate. The test split was back-translated into English to generate machine-translated English test data.

TACRED annotations are specified by token offsets. For translation, tokens were concatenated with white space, and the entity offsets were converted into XML-style markers to denote argument.

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

LDC February 2024 Newsletter

LDC membership discounts expire March 1 

Spring 2024 data scholarship recipients

Four corpora withdrawn from the LDC Catalog

New publications:

Second Language University Speech Intelligibility Corpus

AIDA Scenario 1 Practice Topic Annotation

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LDC membership discounts expire March 1 

Time is running out to save on 2024 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.

Spring 2024 data scholarship recipients 

Congratulations to the recipients of LDC’s Spring 2024 data scholarships:

Jordan Chandler: Université Rennes 2 (France): Master’s student, English Studies. Jordan is awarded a copy of Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English LDC2020T16 to continue his research on the historical development of adjective, quantifier and article indefiniteness in the English language.

Nikhil Raghav: TCG Crest (India): PhD candidate, Institute for Advancing Intelligence. Nikhil is awarded copies of Third DIHARD Challenge Development LDC2022S12 and Third DIHARD Challenge Evaluation LDC2022S14 for his work in speaker diarization. 

Abraham Sanders: Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute (USA): PhD candidate, Cognitive Science. Abraham is awarded copies of Fisher English Training Speech Part 1 Speech LDC2004S13, Fisher English Training Speech Part 1 Transcripts LDC2004T19, Fisher English Training Part 2 Speech LDC2005S13 and Fisher English Training Part 2 Transcripts LDC2005T19, for his work in spoken dialogue systems.  

The next round of applications will be accepted in September 2024. For information about the program, visit the Data Scholarships page.

Four corpora withdrawn from the LDC Catalog 

We regret to announce that The New York Times Annotated Corpus LDC2008T19 has been withdrawn from the LDC Catalog by the data provider. Because they contain data from LDC2008T19, the following three corpora are also withdrawn from the Catalog: Benchmarks for Open Relation Extraction LDC2014T27, Concretely Annotated New York Times LDC2018T12, and News Sub-domain Named Entity Recognition LDC2023T12. Organizations and individuals who have previously licensed any of these data sets can continue to use them under the terms of their respective special license agreements.

New publications:
 
Second Language University Speech Intelligibility Corpus was developed by Northern Arizona University, The Pennsylvania State University, and The University of Texas at Dallas. It contains 10.5 hours of English speech collected from 66 international faculty and university students representing 15 language backgrounds at 10 North American universities. This release also includes orthographic transcriptions for all recordings, intelligibility scores for 73% of the files, speaker metadata, and aligned Praat textgrids. 
 
The speech data is comprised of presentations, descriptions, reflections, and microteaching tasks. Speakers were recruited from courses at intensive English programs and oral skills courses for international graduate students seeking to become international teaching assistants. 
 
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.

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AIDA Scenario 1 Practice Topic Annotation was developed by LDC and is comprised of annotations for 212 English, Russian and Ukrainian web documents (text, image and video) from AIDA Scenario 1 Practice Topic Source Data (LDC2023T11), specifically, the set of practice documents designated for annotation in Phase 1.

Annotations are presented as tab separated files in the following categories for each topic:

• Mentions: single references in source data to a real-world entity or filler, event, or relation. 

• Slots: pre-defined roles in an event or relation filled by an argument (entity mention). 

• Linking: entity mentions linked to entries in the knowledge base as a method of indicating the real-world entity to which an entity referred.

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

LDC November 2023 Newsletter

Join LDC for Membership Year 2024 

Spring 2024 data scholarship application deadline

New publications:

REMIX Telephone Collection

News Sub-domain Named Entity Recognition

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Join LDC for Membership Year 2024 

It’s time to renew your LDC membership for 2024. Current (2023) members who renew their membership before March 1, 2024 will receive a 10% discount. New or returning organizations will receive a 5% discount if they join the Consortium by March 1.

In addition to receiving new publications, current LDC members enjoy the benefit of licensing older data from our Catalog of 940+ holdings at reduced fees. Current-year for-profit members may use most data for commercial applications.

Plans for 2024 publications are in progress. Among the expected releases are: 

• KASET: 147 hours of Sorani Kurdish and Kurmanji Kurdish conversational telephone speech and web broadcasts, 65 hours transcribed 

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

• RATS Low Speech Density Data: 87 hours of Levantine Arabic, English, Persian, Pushto, and Urdu audio files selected from RATS speech activity detection and keyword spotting data sets, also including communications systems sounds and silence

• Call My Net 1: 364 hours of conversational telephone speech recordings in Tagalog, Cebuano, Cantonese and Mandarin from speakers in the Philippines and China using various handsets under diverse noise conditions 

• Ravnursson Faroese Speech and Transcripts: 109 hours of read speech from 433 native speakers with transcripts 

• Diaspora Tibetan Speech: elicited, read and spontaneous speech from 73 native Tibetan speakers in Katmandu’s diaspora Tibetan community, some recordings transcribed

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

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

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

Spring 2024 data scholarship application deadline

Applications are now being accepted through January 15, 2024 for the Spring 2024 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:
 
REMIX Telephone Collection was developed by LDC and contains 320 hours of English conversational telephone speech from 358 speakers who had completed all tasks in one of the previous LDC Mixer collections, specifically, Mixers 4-7. The data was collected in 2012; recordings in this corpus were used to support the NIST 2012 Speaker Recognition Evaluation. Speakers completed up to 12 calls lasting up to 10 minutes conversing on suggested topics. They were asked that half of the calls be made in a "noisy" environment, e.g., from a speakerphone, a busy street, noisy store or office, or a room with loud background noise. Speaker metadata is included. 

2023 members can access this corpus through their LDC accounts. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

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News Sub-domain Named Entity Recognition was developed at the University of Pennsylvania and contains over 20,000 English news sentences annotated with named entities and categorized into sub-domains. The sentences were extracted from The New York Times Annotated Corpus (LDC2008T19). Named entity annotation was based on the CoNLL-2003 guidelines and annotation scheme. Sentences were labeled with person (PER), location (LOC) and organization (ORG) tags using phrase matching with a manual second pass. Sub-domains are: Arts (+Weekend/Cultural), Business (+Financial), Classifieds (+Obituary), Editorial, Foreign, Metropolitan, Sports and Others. "Others" includes topics such as Real Estate, New Jersey Weekly, Book Review, Job Market, Science, and Health & Fitness.

2023 members can access this corpus through their LDC accounts provided they have submitted a signed copy of the special license agreement. Non-members may license this data for a fee.