LDC May 2022 Newsletter

30th Anniversary Highlight: Penn Treebank 

New publications:

NUBUC

Samrómur Icelandic Speech 1.0
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30th Anniversary Highlight: Penn Treebank 
LDC’s Catalog features classic corpora responsible for critical advances in human language technology that continue to influence researchers. Among them are the Penn Treebank releases, Treebank-2 (LDC96T7) and Treebank-3 (LDC99T42).

The Penn Treebank project (1989-1996) produced seven million words tagged for part-of-speech, three million words of parsed text, over two million words annotated for predicate-argument structure and 1.6 million words of transcribed speech annotated for speech disfluencies (Taylor et al., 2003). Source material represents a diverse range of data, including Wall Street Journal (WSJ) articles, the Brown Corpus and Switchboard telephone conversations. 

Penn Treebanks are used for a wide range of purposes, including the creation and training of parsers and taggers, work on machine translation and speech recognition, and research concerning joint syntactic and semantic role labeling. Their ongoing influence is evidenced by the popularity of Treebank-3 (LDC99T42), which continues to be one of LDC’s top ten most distributed corpora in the Catalog. In addition, the WSJ section has served as a model for treebanks across many languages (Nivre, 2008).

The Penn Treebank has inspired related annotation schemes, such as Proposition Bank, the Penn Discourse Treebank project, and word alignment annotation. In addition, LDC has developed revised English treebank guidelines resulting in the re-issue of the WSJ section (English News Text Treebank: Penn Treebank Revised (LDC2015T13)) and treebanked web text (e.g., English Web Treebank (LDC2012T13) and BOLT English Translation Treebank – Chinese Discussion Forum (LDC2020T09)).   

Penn Treebank corpora and its related releases are available for licensing to LDC members and nonmembers. For more information about licensing LDC data, visit Obtaining Data. 

New publications:
(1) NUBUC (NyU-BU contextually controlled stories Corpus) was developed by New York University, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics and Boston University. It contains approximately three hours of English read speech from eight stories focused on linguistic keywords that were created specifically for this corpus, along with transcripts, syntactic annotations and corpus metadata.

Stories are centered on a protagonist and bear a similarity to a modern fairy tale. Each story consists of approximately 2,000 words organized around critical keywords matched along multiple linguistic dimensions. The story texts comprise a total of 1024 sentences and 16,472 words. Each story was read by two different voice actors, one male and one female, in a neutral American English accent. 

Recordings are 11-12 minutes in duration, for a total of about 90 minutes of continuous speech per speaker.

NUBUC is distributed via web download.  

2022 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2022 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data at no cost.

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(2) Samrómur Icelandic Speech 1.0 was developed by the Language and Voice Lab, Reykjavik University in cooperation with Almannarómur, Center for Language Technology. The corpus contains 145 hours of Icelandic prompted speech from 8,392 speakers representing 100,000 utterances.

Speech data was collected between October 2019 and May 2021 using the Samrómur website which displayed prompts to participants. The prompts were mainly from The Icelandic Gigaword Corpus, which includes text from novels, news, plays, and from a list of location names in Iceland. Additional prompts were taken from the Icelandic Web of Science and others were created by combining a name followed by a question or a demand. Prompts and speaker metadata are included in the corpus.

Samrómur Icelandic Speech 1.0 is distributed via web download.  

2022 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. 2022 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

LDC 2015 July Newsletter

Fall 2015 Data Scholarship Program

New publications 
English News Text Treebank: Penn Treebank Revised 
TS Wikipedia
The Walking Around Corpus
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Fall 2015 Data Scholarship Program

Applications are now being accepted through Tuesday, September 15, 2015 for the Fall 2015 LDC Data Scholarship program. The LDC Data Scholarship program provides university students with access to LDC data at no-cost.

This program is open to students pursuing both undergraduate and graduate studies in an accredited college or university. LDC Data Scholarships are not restricted to any particular field of study; however, students must demonstrate a well-developed research agenda and a bona fide inability to pay. The selection process is highly competitive.

The application consists of two parts:

(1) Data Use Proposal. Applicants must submit a proposal describing their intended use of the data. The proposal should state which data the student plans to use and how the data will benefit their research project as well as information on the proposed methodology or algorithm.

Applicants should consult the LDC Catalog for a complete list of data distributed by LDC. Due to certain restrictions, a handful of LDC corpora are restricted to members of the Consortium. Applicants are advised to select a maximum of one to two databases.

(2) Letter of Support. Applicants must submit one letter of support from their thesis adviser or department chair. The letter must confirm that the department or university lacks the funding to pay the full non-member fee for the data and verify the student's need for data.

For further information on application materials and program rules, please visit the LDC Data Scholarship page.

New publications

(1) English News Text Treebank: Penn Treebank Revised was developed by LDC with funding through a gift from Google Inc. It consists of a combination of automated and manual revisions of the Penn Treebank annotation of Wall Street Journal (WSJ) stories. The data is comprised of 1,203,648 word-level tokens in 49,191 sentence-level tokens -- in all 2,312 of the original Penn Treebank WSJ files.

This release includes revised tokenization, part-of-speech, and syntactic treebank annotation intended to bring the full WSJ treebank section into compliance with the agreed-upon policies and updates implemented for current English treebank annotation specifications at LDC. Examples include English Web Treebank (LDC2012T13), OntoNotes (LDC2013T19), and English translation treebanks such as English Translation Treebank: An-Nahar Newswire (LDC2012T02). English Treebank Supplemental Guidelines are included in this release.

2015 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus on disc.  2015 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for a fee.

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(2) TS Wikipedia is a collection of approximately 1.6 million processed Turkish Wikipedia pages. The data is tokenized and includes part-of-speech tags, morphological analysis, lemmas, bi-grams and tri-grams.

The data is in a word-per-line format with five tab-separated columns: token, part-of-speech tag, morphological analysis, lemma and corrected token spelling if needed. All data is presented in UTF-8 XML files and was selected and filtered to reduce non-Turkish characters, mathematical formulas and non-Turkish entries.

TS Wikipedia is distributed via web download.

2015 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus on disc.  2015 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for a fee.  TS Wikipedia is made available to for-profit members under the LDC For-Profit Membership Agreement and to not-for-profit members and non-members under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial Share Alike 3.0 license.

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(3) The Walking Around Corpus was developed by Stony Brook University and is comprised of approximately 33 hours of navigational telephone dialogues from 72 speakers (36 speaker pairs). Participants were Stony Brook University students who identified themselves as native English speakers.

This corpus was elicited using a navigation task in which one person directed another to walk to 18 unique destinations on Stony Brook University’s West campus. The direction-giver remained inside the lab and gave directions on a landline telephone to the pedestrian who used a mobile phone. As they visited each location, the pedestrians took a picture of each of the 18 destinations using the mobile phone. Pairs conversed spontaneously as they completed the task. The pedestrians' locations were tracked using their cell phones' GPS systems. The pedestrians did not have any maps or pictures of the target destinations and therefore relied on the direction-giver's verbal directions and descriptions to locate and photograph the target destinations.

Each digital audio file was transcribed with time stamps. The corpus material also includes the visual materials (pictures and maps) used to elicit the dialogues, data about the speakers' relationship, spatial abilities and memory performance, and other information.

All audio is presented as 8000Hz, 16-bit flac compressed wav. Transcripts are presented as xls spreadsheets.

The Walking Around Corpus is distributed via web download.

2015 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus on disc.  2015 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for a fee.

LDC 2015 May Newsletter

Early renewing members save again

Commercial use and LDC data

New publications:

Coordination Annotation for the Penn Treebank
GALE Phase 3 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Speech Part 2
GALE Phase 3 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Transcripts Part 2
SenSem Lexicons

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Early renewing members save again

LDC's early renewal discount program has resulted in substantial savings for current year members. The 110 organizations that renewed their membership or joined early for Membership Year 2015 (MY2015) saved over US$65,000 on membership fees. MY2014 members are still eligible for a 5% discount when renewing through 2015.

LDC membership benefits include free membership year data as well as discounts on older corpora. For-profit members can use most LDC data for commercial applications. 

Commercial use and LDC data

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 our Licensing page for further information,

New publications

(1) Coordination Annotation for the Penn Treebank is a stand-off annotation for the Wall Street Journal portion of Treebank-3 (PTB3) (LDC99T42) developed by researchers at the University of Düsseldorf and Indiana University. It marks all tokens that have a coordinating function (potentially among other functions).

Coordination is a syntactic structure that links together two or more elements known as conjuncts or conjoins. The presence of coordination is often signaled by the appearance of a coordinator (coordinating conjunction), such as and, or, but in English.

This annotation is presented in a single UTF-8 plain text tsv file with columns as follows:

section: Penn Treebank WSJ section number

file: Number of file within section

sentence: Number of sentence (starting with 0)

token: Number of token (starting with 0)

annotation: "P" if the token is a coordinating punctuation, "O" otherwise

Coordination Annotation for the Penn Treebank is available at no cost to all licensees of PTB3 and appears in their download queue associated with LDC99T42 as penn_coordination_anno_LDC2015T08.tgz.

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(2) GALE Phase 3 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Speech Part 2 was developed by LDC and is comprised of approximately 112 hours of Mandarin Chinese broadcast conversation speech collected in 2007 and 2008 by LDC and Hong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong, during Phase 3 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) Program. Corresponding transcripts are released as GALE Phase 3 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Transcripts Part 2 (LDC2015T09). 

Broadcast audio for the GALE program was collected at LDC’s Philadelphia, PA USA facilities and at three remote collection sites. The combined local and outsourced broadcast collection supported GALE at a rate of approximately 300 hours per week of programming from more than 50 broadcast sources for a total of over 30,000 hours of collected broadcast audio over the life of the program.

The broadcast conversation recordings in this release feature interviews, call-in programs, and roundtable discussions focusing principally on current events from the following sources: Beijing TV, China Central TV, Hubei TV, Phoenix TV and Voice of America.

This release contains 209 audio files presented in FLAC-compressed Waveform Audio File format (.flac), 16000 Hz single-channel 16-bit PCM. Each file was audited by a native Chinese speaker following Audit Procedure Specification Version 2.0 which is included in this release. The broadcast auditing process served three principal goals: as a check on the operation of the broadcast collection system equipment by identifying failed, incomplete or faulty recordings, as an indicator of broadcast schedule changes by identifying instances when the incorrect program was recorded, and as a guide for data selection by retaining information about a program’s genre, data type and topic.

GALE Phase 3 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Speech Part 2 is distributed on DVD.  2015 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus.  2015 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for a fee.

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(3) GALE Phase 3 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Transcripts Part 2 was developed by LDC and contains transcriptions of approximately 112 hours of Chinese broadcast conversation speech collected in 2007 and 2008 by LDC and Hong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong, during Phase 3 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) Program. Corresponding audio data is released as GALE Phase 3 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Speech Part 2 (LDC2015S06). 

The transcript files are in plain-text, tab-delimited format (TDF) with UTF-8 encoding, and the transcribed data totals 1,388,236 tokens. The transcripts were created with the LDC-developed transcription tool, XTrans, a multi-platform, multilingual, multi-channel transcription tool that supports manual transcription and annotation of audio recordings.

The files in this corpus were transcribed by LDC staff and/or by transcription vendors under contract to LDC. Transcribers followed LDC's quick transcription guidelines (QTR) and quick rich transcription specification (QRTR) both of which are included in the documentation with this release. QTR transcription consists of quick (near-) verbatim, time-aligned transcripts plus speaker identification with minimal additional mark-up. It does not include sentence unit annotation. QRTR annotation adds structural information such as topic boundaries and manual sentence unit annotation to the core components of a quick transcript. Files with QTR as part of the filename were developed using QTR transcription. Files with QRTR in the filename indicate QRTR transcription.

GALE Phase 3 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Transcripts Part 2 is distributed via web download.  2015 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus on disc.  2015 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for a fee.

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(4) SenSem (Sentence Semantics) Lexicons was developed by GRIAL, the Linguistic Applications Inter-University Research Group that includes the following Spanish institutions: the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, the Universitat de Barcelona, the Universitat de Lleida and the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. It contains feature descriptions for approximately 1,300 Spanish verbs and 1,300 Catalan verbs in the SenSem Databank (LDC2015T02). GRIAL's work focuses on resources for applied linguistics, including lexicography, translation and natural language processing.

The verb features for each language consist of two groups: those codified manually, including definition, WordNet synset, Aktionsart, arguments and semantic functions; and those extracted automatically from the SenSem Databank. Among the latter are verb frequency, semantic construction, syntactic categories and constituent order. The verbs analyzed correspond to the 250 most frequent verbs in Spanish and 320 lemmas in Catalan. Further information about the SenSem project can be obtained from the GRIAL website. Data is presented in a single XML file per language.

SenSem Lexicons is distributed via web download.

2015 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus on disc.  2015 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for a fee.  This data is made available to LDC not-for-profit members and all non-members under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial Share Alike 3.0 license and to LDC for-profit members under the terms of the For-Profit Membership Agreement.