Showing posts with label CTS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CTS. Show all posts

Monday, February 16, 2026

LDC February 2026 Newsletter

LDC membership discounts expire March 2 

Spring 2026 data scholarship recipient 


New publications:

2022 NIST Language Recognition Evaluation Test and Development Sets

KAIROS Schema Learning Background Source Data

LORELEI Russian Representative Language Pack

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LDC membership discounts expire March 2 
Time is running out to save on 2026 membership fees. Renew your LDC membership, rejoin the Consortium, or become a new member by March 2 to receive a 10% discount. For more information on membership benefits and options, visit Join LDC.


Spring 2026 data scholarship recipient 

Congratulations to the recipient of LDC’s Spring 2026 data scholarship:

Doma Akshitha Reddy: Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology (India): Bachelor of Engineering, Information Technology. Doma is awarded copies of TIMIT Acoustic-Phonetic Continuous Speech Corpus and The CMU Kids Corpus for their work in child speech. 

Since 2010, LDC has awarded scholarships to successful student applicants twice each year. To date more than 242 corpora have been distributed to 162 students across 38 countries. We proudly celebrate their achievements and the contributions their research has made to the broader community. 

The next round of applications will be accepted in September 2026. For information about the program, visit the Data Scholarships page.


New publications:

2022 NIST Language Recognition Evaluation Test and Development Sets was developed by LDC and  NIST and contains the test and development data, metadata, answer keys, and documentation for the 2022 NIST Language Recognition Evaluation (LRE22). The source data is comprised of 222 hours of conversational telephone speech (CTS) and broadcast narrowband speech (BNBS) in 14 languages: Afrikaans, Tunisian Arabic, Algerian Arabic, Libyan Arabic, South African English, Indian-accented South African English, North African French, Ndebele, Oromo, Tigrinya, Tsonga, Venda, Xhosa and Zulu.

For the CTS collections, a small number of native speakers made single calls to multiple individuals in their social network. Calls lasted 8-15 minutes; speakers were free to discuss any topic. The BNBS data was collected from streaming radio programming, focused on broadcasts that included narrowband speech (e.g., call-ins to a talk show). Portions of the CTS callee call sides and portions of each broadcast recording were manually audited by native speakers to verify language and quality.

LRE22 emphasized language recognition for African languages, including low resource languages, and expanded the range of test segment durations. Further information about the 2022 evaluation can be found in the 2022 NIST Language Recognition Evaluation Plan. 

2026 members can access this corpus through their LDC accounts. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

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KAIROS Schema Learning Background Source Data was developed by LDC and includes 14,000 English and Spanish documents representing text, audio, video, image, and multimedia resources collected during the DARPA KAIROS program as supplemental background source data for the KAIROS Schema Learning Corpus (SLC). The purpose of the supplemental collection was to increase the amount of English and Spanish data with multimedia components for schema learning and to add domains not well represented in existing Spanish data. The supplemental data in this release includes material from the business and logistics domains, instructional documents and multimedia news.

The complete set of SLC background source data (including the data in this publication) totaled 16.2 million English, Russian and Spanish documents and more than 125,000 audio, video, image, or multimedia resources. A large portion of that data was drawn from pre-existing LDC datasets.

The SLC and KAIROS Schema Learning Complex Event Annotation (LDC2025T07), containing English and Spanish text, audio, video, and image material labeled for 93 real-world complex events, constitute the data used by KAIROS system developers for schema learning.

KAIROS systems utilized formal event representations in the form of schema libraries that specified the steps, preconditions and constraints for an open set of complex events; schemas were then used in combination with event extraction to characterize and make predictions about real-world events in a large multilingual, multimedia corpus.

2026 members can access this corpus through their LDC accounts. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

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LORELEI Russian Representative Language Pack contains over 1.26 billion words of Russian monolingual text, 360,00 words of which were translated into English, 3 million words of found Russian-English parallel text, and 87,000 Russian words translated from English data. Approximately 83,000 words were annotated for simple named entities, around 26,000 words were annotated for full entity (including nominals and pronouns), entity linking and situation frames (identifying entities, needs and issues) and nearly 9,000 words were covered by noun phrase chunking annotation. 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).

2026 members can access this corpus through their LDC accounts. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

Monday, March 17, 2025

LDC March 2025 Newsletter

LDC data and commercial technology development

New publications:

2015 NIST Language Recognition Evaluation Test Set

The Xi’an Multi-Language Learner Corpus

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LDC data and commercial technology development
For-profit organizations are reminded that an LDC membership is a pre-requisite for obtaining a commercial license to almost all LDC databases. Non-member organizations, including non-member for-profit organizations, cannot use LDC data to develop or test products for commercialization, nor can they use LDC data in any commercial product or for any commercial purpose. LDC data users should consult corpus-specific license agreements for limitations on the use of certain corpora. Visit the Licensing page for further information.

New publications:

2015 NIST Language Recognition Evaluation Test Set was developed by LDC and NIST. It contains the evaluation test set for the 2015 NIST Language Recognition Evaluation (LRE), approximately 867 hours of conversational telephone speech (CTS) and broadcast narrowband speech (BNBS) collected by LDC in 20 languages over 6 clusters of related languages: Arabic (Egyptian, Iraqi, Levantine, Maghrebi, Modern Standard Arabic); Spanish (Caribbean, European, Latin American, Brazilian Portuguese); English (British, Indian, General American English); Chinese (Cantonese, Mandarin, Min Nan, Wu); Slavic (Polish, Russian); and French (West African, Haitian Creole).

The CTS data includes calls between individuals in the same social networks lasting 8-15 minutes and telephone speech from the IARPA Babel series collected in 2012-2013 from speakers using a range of phone types in diverse settings with varying noise conditions. The BNBS data was collected by LDC from streaming and satellite radio programming, focusing on programs that included narrowband speech (e.g., call-ins to a talk show).

The goal of NIST's LRE evaluations is to establish the baseline of current performance capability for CTS language recognition and to lay the groundwork for further research efforts. LRE15 expanded the range of test segment durations and added a test condition that allowed systems to make use of unrestricted training data when developing models

2025 members can access this corpus through their LDC accounts. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

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The Xi’an Multi-Language Learner Corpus was developed by Xi'an International Studies University (XISU) and is comprised of 526 argumentative essays in 15 languages by Chinese L1 university students studying second languages, along with student metadata and writing prompts. It was developed to support second language learner research and to provide a database for cross-linguistic comparison of second languages. 

Data was collected in 2023 and 2024 from students at XISU and Yunnan Minzu University (YMU) who were linguistic majors or studying one of the foreign languages available at XISU and YMU. Off-topic essays and incomplete texts were excluded.

2025 members can access this corpus through their LDC accounts. Non-members may license this data for a fee.