LDC July 2022 Newsletter

Fall 2022 LDC Data Scholarship Program

30th Anniversary Highlight: ATIS0 Complete 

New publications:

Qatari Corpus of Argumentative Writing

Second DIHARD Challenge Evaluation - SEEDLingS

 

 

Fall 2022 LDC Data Scholarship Program 

Student applications for the Fall 2022 LDC Data Scholarship program are being accepted now through September 15, 2022. This program provides eligible students with no-cost access to LDC data. Students must complete an application consisting of a data use proposal and letter of support from their advisor. For application requirements and program rules, visit the LDC Data Scholarships page. 

30th Anniversary Highlight: ATIS0 Complete 

The ATIS corpora were among the first publications that appeared with the launch of LDC’s catalog in 1993. ATIS0 Complete (LDC93S4A) is comprised of spontaneous speech, read speech and other material from participants in the ATIS collection that is contained in ATIS0 Pilot (LDC93S4B), ATIS0 Read (LDC93S4B-2) and ATIS0 SD-Read (LDC93S4B-3).

The ATIS (Air Travel Information Services) collection was developed to support the research and development of speech understanding systems. Participants were presented with various hypothetical travel planning scenarios and asked to solve them by interacting with partially or completely automated ATIS systems. The resulting utterances were recorded and transcribed. Data was collected in the early 1990s at five US sites: Raytheon BBN, Carnegie Mellon University, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, National Institute for Standards and Technology and SRI International.

The ATIS collection has been widely used to further research in spoken language understanding and slot filling (Kuo et al., 2020). Other data sets published from the collection include ATIS2 (LDC93S5), ATIS3 Training and Test Data (LDC94S19, LDC95S26) and, more recently, Multilingual ATIS (LDC2019T04) and ATIS - Seven Languages (LDC2021T04).

All ATIS corpora are available for licensing by Consortium members and non-members. Visit Obtaining Data for more information.

New publications:

(1) Qatari Corpus of Argumentative Writing  was developed by Qatar University, University of Exeter and Hamad Bin Khalifa University and is comprised of approximately 200,000 tokens of Arabic and English writing by undergraduate students (159 female, 36 male) along with annotations and related metadata. Students were native Arabic speakers and fluent in English; each student wrote one Arabic and one English essay in response to specific argumentative prompts. They were instructed to include in their essays a clear thesis statement supported by relevant evidence.
 
The corpus is divided into Arabic and English parts, each of which contains 195 essays. Metadata includes information about the students (gender, major, first language, second language) and information about the essay texts (serial numbers of texts, word limits, genre, date of writing, time spent on writing, place of writing).

Qatari Corpus of Argumentative Writing 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 for a fee.

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(2) Second DIHARD Challenge Evaluation - SEEDLingS was developed by Duke University and LDC and contains approximately two hours of English child language recordings along with corresponding annotations used in support of the Second DIHARD Challenge.
 
Source data is from the SEEDLingS (The Study of Environmental Effects on Developing Linguistic Skills) corpus, designed to investigate how infants' early linguistic and environmental input plays a role in their learning. Recordings were generated in the home environment of infants in the Rochester, New York area. A subset of that data was annotated by LDC for use in the First and Second DIHARD Challenges.

Second DIHARD Challenge Evaluation - SEEDLingS 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 June 2022 Newsletter

LDC at LREC 2022

LDC data and commercial technology development

30th Anniversary Highlight: TIMIT 

New publication:

Second DIHARD Challenge Evaluation - Eleven Sources

 

LDC at LREC 2022
LDC will attend the 13th Language Resource Evaluation Conference (LREC2022), hosted by ELRA, the European Language Resource Association, in Marseille, France June 20-25, 2022. Several LDC staff members will be presenting current work on topics including WeCanTalk: A New Multi-language, Multi-modal Resource for Speaker Recognition; Reflections on 30 Years of Language Resource Development and Sharing; A Study in Contradiction: Data and Annotation for AIDA Focusing on Informational Conflict in Russia-Ukraine Relations; Data Protection, Privacy and US Regulation; BeSt: The Belief and Sentiment Corpus; and more.

Stay tuned for specific announcements on LDC’s social media pages regarding presentation times and locations. Following the conference, LDC’s presented papers and posters will be available on the Papers Page.

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.

30th Anniversary Highlight: TIMIT 
The TIMIT Acoustic-Phonetic Continuous Speech Corpus is another of the classic releases in LDC’s Catalog. Designed for the acquisition of acoustic-phonetic knowledge and for the development and evaluation of automatic speech recognition systems, it contains recordings of 630 American English speakers each reading 10 phonetically rich sentences, for a total of 6300 utterances comprising 2342 distinct sentences. Data collection and annotation were a joint effort by Texas Instruments, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and SRI International, and the data release was prepared by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology).  

TIMIT was among the first publications that appeared with the launch of LDC’s catalog in 1993. It remains one of the Consortium’s top ten distributed corpora and may be the single most widely-used speech database. Despite its age and small size relative to modern data sets, TIMIT’s wide range of phonetically-representative inputs, its time-aligned lexical and phonemic transcripts, and its easy availability through the LDC Catalog have contributed to its widespread use and continued popularity. Thousands of researchers remember its famous first sentence: “she had your dark suit in greasy wash water all year”. 

LDC continues the TIMIT series with its Global TIMIT project which aims to create a series of corpora in a variety of languages with TIMIT-like features. (Chanchaochai et al., 2018). Data sets published from that project include: Global TIMIT Learner Treebank English, Global TIMIT Learner Simple English, Global TIMIT Mandarin Chinese – Guanzhong Dialect, and Global TIMIT Mandarin Chinese.  

The LDC Catalog features over 900 holdings in more than 90 languages and more data is added each year. All TIMIT corpora are available for licensing by Consortium members and non-members. Visit Obtaining Data for more information. 

New publication:
 
Second DIHARD Challenge Evaluation - Eleven Sources was developed by LDC and contains approximately 20 hours of English and Chinese speech data along with corresponding annotations used in support of the Second DIHARD Challenge.

The DIHARD second development and evaluation sets were drawn from diverse sources including monologues, map task dialogues, broadcast interviews, sociolinguistic interviews, meeting speech, speech in restaurants, clinical recordings, extended child language acquisition recordings, and web videos. Annotations include diarization and segmentation.

Second DIHARD Challenge Evaluation - Eleven Sources 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 for a fee.