Showing posts with label Speech Recognition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Speech Recognition. Show all posts

Friday, March 13, 2020

LDC 2020 March Newsletter

Spring 2020 LDC Data Scholarship recipients 
LDC data and commercial technology development

__________________________________________________________________ 

Spring 2020 LDC Data Scholarship recipients 

LDC congratulates the following Spring 2020 Data Scholarship recipients: 
  • Zahra Azin (Istanbul Technical University, Turkey) is awarded a copy of Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) Annotation Release 3.0 (LDC2020T02) for her work in Turkish AMR.
  •  Spandan Dey (IIT Kharagpur, India) is awarded a copy of Multi-Language Conversational Telephone Speech – South Asian (LDC2017S14) for his research on automatic language recognition.
  • Jonathan Downey (University of California, Santa Barbara, US) is awarded a copy of the ETS Corpus of Non-Native Written English (LDC2014T06) for his research on second language acquisition and quantitative methodologies for educational measurements.
  • Nathaniel Fackler (University of Georgia, US) is awarded a copy of the ETS Corpus of Non-Native Written English (LDC2014T06) for his work on adult second language acquisition.
  • B. Senthil Kumar (SSN College of Engineering & Anna University, India) is awarded a copy of 2009 CoNLL Shared Task Part 2 (LDC2012T04) for his research on semantic role labeling.
  • Ming Li (Colorado School of Mines, US) is awarded a copy of TIDIGITS (LDC93S10) for her research on inferring speech signals from motion data in Internet of Things (IoT) security.
  • Jialiang Lin (Xiamen University, China) is awarded a copy of the ETS Corpus of Non-Native Written English (LDC2014T06) for his project to train and test an automated essay scoring model.
Students can learn more about the LDC Data Scholarship program and the next application cycle on the Data Scholarships 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.
__________________________________________________________________ 

New publications: 

(1) BOLT Egyptian Arabic-English Word Alignment -- Conversational Telephone Speech Training was developed by LDC and consists of 153,171 words of Egyptian Arabic and English parallel text enhanced with linguistic tags to indicate word relations.

The source data in this release consists of transcripts of Egyptian Arabic conversational telephone speech (CTS) from LDC's CALLHOME and CALLFRIEND collections (LDC97S45, LDC97T19, LDC2002S37, LDC2002T38, LDC96S49) that was translated into English by professional translation agencies and annotated for the word alignment task.

The BOLT word alignment task was built on treebank annotation. Egyptian Arabic source tree tokens were automatically extracted from tree files in LDC’s BOLT Egyptian Arabic Treebank, which had been tagged for part-of-speech and syntactically annotated. That data was then aligned and annotated for the word alignment task.

BOLT Egyptian Arabic-English Word Alignment -- Conversational Telephone Speech Training is distributed via web download. 

2020 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2020 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee. 

* 

(2) EVALution was developed by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. It is comprised of English and Mandarin Chinese data sets -- EVALution 1.0 and EVALution-Man, respectively -- that contain semantic relations and metadata for training and evaluating distributional semantic models. 

EVALution 1.0 consists of approximately 7500 English tuples extracted from ConceptNet 5.0 and WordNet 4.0 and filtered through automatic methods and crowd-sourcing. Several semantic relations between word pairs were instantiated, including hypernymy, synonymy, antonymy and meronymy. The corpus also includes additional information that can be used to filter the pairs or to analyze the results, such as relation domain, word frequency, word part-of-speech and word semantic field.

EVALution-MAN consists of Chinese word pairs from two sources: Chinese Wordnet and humans who completed an elicitation task by supplying missing words to sentences. The human-supplied sentence word pairs were then judged by human raters for reliability. 

EVALution is distributed via web download. 

2020 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. 2020 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

*

(3) Mixer 4 and 5 Speech was developed by LDC and contains approximately 14,185 hours of audio recordings of conversational telephone speech, interviews, elicitation exercises and transcript readings involving 616 distinct speakers. The material was collected in 2007 as part of the Mixer project – which supported speaker recognition for a variety of research tasks – and recordings in this corpus were used in the 2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation.

The data in this release was collected by LDC at its Human Subjects Data Collection Laboratories in Philadelphia and by the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at the University of California, Berkeley, as a collaborative, carefully coordinated activity at both recording sites. The Mixer 4 and 5 collection contains 2,568 recordings made via the public telephone network and 2,152 sessions of multiple microphone recordings in office-room settings.

The telephone protocol connected recruited speakers through a robot operator to carry on casual conversations. In Mixer 4, 400 subjects made ten 10-minute calls; half of those subjects also visited one of the collection sites where they made two telephone calls while also being recorded on a cross-channel platform. In Mixer 5, 300 subjects each completed ten calls and six interview sessions at either LDC or ICSI; those sessions were conducted on a cross channel platform and included a telephone call in one of three vocal-effort conditions - normal, high and low. Mixer participants were nearly all native English speakers, the rest being bilingual English speakers.

This release includes metadata about the calls and speakers, along with time-aligned entries for many of the component portions of the recording sessions.

Mixer 4 and 5 Speech is distributed via hard drive.

2020 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2020 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. This corpus is a members-only release and is not available for non-member licensing. Contact ldc@ldc.upenn.edu for information about membership.
*

Monday, June 17, 2019

LDC 2019 June Newsletter

In this newsletter:

New Publications:
USC-SFI MALACH Interviews and Transcripts English – Speech Recognition Edition
First DIHARD Challenge Development - Eight Sources
_____________________________________________________________________

New publications:  

(1) DEFT Spanish Committed Belief Annotation was developed by LDC and consists of approximately 67,000 tokens of Spanish discussion forum text annotated for "committed belief," which marks the level of commitment displayed by the author to the truth of the propositions expressed in the text.

DARPA's Deep Exploration and Filtering of Text (DEFT) program aimed to address remaining capability gaps in state-of-the-art natural language processing technologies related to inference, causal relationships and anomaly detection. LDC supported the DEFT program by collecting, creating and annotating a variety of data sources. 

DEFT Spanish Committed Belief Annotation is distributed via web download.

2019 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2019 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a cost. 

*

(2) USC-SFI MALACH Interviews and Transcripts English – Speech Recognition Edition was developed by IBM as part of the MALACH (Multilingual Access to Large Spoken ArCHives) Project and contains approximately 168 hours of interviews from 682 Holocaust witnesses along with transcripts, a lexicon and other documentation. This release augments USC-SFI MALACH Interviews and Transcripts English (LDC2012S05) by modifying and updating a subset of the original corpus for use with speech recognition systems, such as the Kaldi toolkit.

Specifically, the audio data has been converted from unsegmented mpeg files to a segmented flac compressed format. The speaker-turn, time-stamped transcripts have been updated to an utterance-by-utterance format. A lexicon mapping words to phonemes is provided, and the data is divided into development and training sets.  

The goal of the MALACH project was to develop methods for improved access to large multinational spoken archives in order to advance the state of the art of automatic speech recognition and information retrieval. The characteristics of the USC-SFI collection -- unconstrained, natural speech filled with disfluencies, heavy accents, age-related coarticulations, un-cued speaker and language switching and emotional speech -- were considered well-suited for that task. 

USC-SFI MALACH Interviews and Transcripts English – Speech Recognition Edition is distributed via web download. 

2019 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. 2019 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data at no cost.

*

(3) First DIHARD Challenge Development - Eight Sources was developed by LDC and contains approximately 17 hours of English and Chinese speech data along with corresponding annotations used in support of the First DIHARD Challenge. This release, when combined with First DIHARD Challenge Development - SEEDLingS (LDC2019S10), contains the development set audio data and annotation (diarization, segmentation) as well as the official scoring tool.


The First DIHARD Challenge was an attempt to reinvigorate work on diarization through a shared task focusing on "hard" diarization; that is, speech diarization for challenging corpora where there was an expectation that existing state-of-the-art systems would fare poorly. As such, it included speech from a wide sampling of domains representing diversity in number of speakers, speaker demographics, interaction style, recording quality, and environmental conditions as follows (all sources are in English unless otherwise indicated):
  • Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) interviews
  • DCIEM/HCRC map task (LDC96S38)
  • Audiobook recordings from LibriVox
  • Meeting speech from 2004 Spring NIST Rich Transcription (RT-04S) Development (LDC2007S11) and Evaluation (LDC2007S12) releases.
  • 2001 U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments
  • Sociolinguistic interviews from SLX Corpus of Classic Sociolinguistic Interviews (LDC2003T15)
  • Chinese video collected by LDC as part of the Video Annotation for Speech Technologies (VAST) project
  • YouthPoint radio interviews

First DIHARD Challenge Development - Eight Sources is distributed via web download. 

2019 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus.  2019 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a cost.

*

(4) First DIHARD Challenge Development - 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 First DIHARD Challenge. This release, when combined with First DIHARD Challenge Development - Eight Sources (LDC2019S09), contains the development set audio data and annotation (diarization, segmentation) as well as the official scoring tool.

The source data was drawn 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 for SEEDLingS were generated in the home environment of 44 infants from 6-18 months of age in the Rochester, New York area. A subset of that data was annotated by LDC for use in the First DIHARD Challenge.

The First DIHARD Challenge was an attempt to reinvigorate work on diarization through a shared task focusing on "hard" diarization; that is, speech diarization for challenging corpora where there was an expectation that existing state-of-the-art systems would fare poorly. As such, it included speech from a wide sampling of domains representing diversity in number of speakers, speaker demographics, interaction style, recording quality, and environmental conditions.

First DIHARD Challenge Development – SEEDLingS is distributed via web download.

2019 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. 2019 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a cost.

*

Monday, May 20, 2019

LDC 2019 May Newsletter

New Publications:
Multi-Language Conversational Telephone Speech 2011 -- English Group  
IARPA Babel Guarani Language Pack IARPA-babel305b-v1.0c __________________________________________________________ 

New publications: 

(1) Multi-Language Conversational Telephone Speech 2011 -- English Group was developed by LDC and is comprised of approximately 18 hours of telephone speech in two general varieties of English: American and South Asian. 

The data were collected primarily to support research and technology evaluation in automatic language identification, and portions of these telephone calls were used in the NIST 2011 Language Recognition Evaluation (LRE). Participants were recruited by native speakers who contacted acquaintances in their social network. Those native speakers made one call, up to 15 minutes, to each acquaintance. Calls are labeled by human auditors for callee gender, dialect type, and noise.   

LDC has also released the following as part of the Multi-Language Conversational Telephone Speech 2011 series: 

Multi-Language Conversational Telephone Speech 2011 -- English Group is distributed via web download.

2019 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2019 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.
*
(2) TAC KBP Chinese Regular Slot Filling - Comprehensive Training and Evaluation Data 2014 was developed by LDC and contains training and evaluation data produced in support of the TAC KBP Chinese Regular Slot Filling evaluation track conducted in 2014. This release includes queries, the 'manual runs' (human-produced responses to the queries), the final rounds of assessment results, and the complete set of Chinese source documents.

The regular Chinese Slot Filling evaluation track involved mining information about entities from text. In completing the task, participating systems and LDC annotators searched a corpus for information on certain attributes (slots) of person and organization entities and attempted to return all valid answers (slot fillers) in the source collection.

TAC KBP Chinese Regular Slot Filling - Comprehensive Training and Evaluation Data 2014 is distributed via web download.

2019 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2019 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

*
(3) CIEMPIESS Experimentation (Corpus de Investigación en Español de México del Posgrado de Ingeniería Eléctrica y Servicio Social) was developed by the Facultad de Ingeniería at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and consists of approximately 22 hours of Mexican Spanish broadcast and read speech with associated transcripts. The goal of this work was to create acoustic models for automatic speech recognition. For more information and documentation see the CIEMPIESS-UNAM Project website.

CIEMPIESS Experimentation is a set of three different data sets, specifically Complementary, Fem, and Test. Complementary is a phonetically-balanced corpus of isolated Spanish words spoken in Central Mexico. Fem contains broadcast speech from 21 female speakers, collected to balance by gender the number of recordings from male speakers in other CIEMPIESS collections. Test consists of 10 hours of broadcast speech and transcripts and is intended for use as a standard test data set alongside other CIEMPIESS corpora.

Most of the speech recordings in Fem and Test were collected from Radio-IUS, a UNAM radio station. Other recordings were taken from IUS Canal Multimedia and Centro Universitario de Estudios Jurídicos (CUEJ UNAM). Those two channels feature videos with speech around legal issues and topics related to UNAM. The Complementary recordings consist of read speech collected for that corpus.

LDC has released the following data sets in the CIEMPIESS series: 
CIEMPIESS Experimentation is distributed via web download.

2019 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2019 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data at no cost.

*
(4) IARPA Babel Guarani Language Pack IARPA-babel305b-v1.0c was developed by Appen for the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) Babel program. This corpus contains approximately 198 hours of Guarani conversational and scripted telephone speech collected in 2014 and 2015 along with corresponding transcripts.

The Guarani speech in this release represents that spoken in Paraguay. The gender distribution among speakers is approximately equal; speakers' ages range from 16 years to 67 years. Calls were made using different telephones (e.g., mobile, landline) from a variety of environments including the street, a home or office, a public place, and inside a vehicle.

IARPA Babel Guarani Language Pack IARPA-babel305b-v1.0c is distributed via web download.

2019 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. 2019 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.
*

Thursday, January 19, 2017

LDC January 2017 Newsletter

LDC Membership Discounts for MY2017 Still Available

New publications:
___________________________________________________________________
LDC Membership Discounts for MY2017 Still Available
Join LDC now while membership savings are still available. 2016 members receive a 10% discount when renewing before March 1, 2017, or a 5% discount when renewing any time in 2017. Non-consecutive members and new members receive a 5% discount when renewing before March 1, 2017.  Membership remains the most economical way to access LDC releases.  This year’s planned publications include 2010 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation data set, Multilanguage Conversational Telephone Speech, Noisy TIMIT, IARPA Babel Language Packs, RATS Keyword Spotting, BOLT parallel and word-aligned data in all languages and more. Browse the Members pages for details on membership options and benefits.

New Corpora

(1) Arabic Speech Recognition Pronunciation Dictionary was developed by the Qatar Computing Research Institute. It contains approximately two million pronunciation entries for 526,000 Modern Standard Arabic words, for an average of 3.84 pronunciations for each grapheme word. The dictionary was developed from news archive resources, including the Arabic news website Aljazeera.net. The selected words were those that occurred more than once in the news collection. 
Arabic Speech Recognition Pronunciation Dictionary is distributed via web download.
2017 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus. 2017 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.
*
(2) IARPA Babel Vietnamese Language Pack IARPA-babel107b-v0.7 was developed by Appen for the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) Babel program. It contains approximately 201 hours of Vietnamese conversational and scripted telephone speech collected in 2012 along with corresponding transcripts.

The Babel program focuses on underserved languages and seeks to develop speech recognition technology that can be rapidly applied to any human language to support keyword search performance over large amounts of recorded speech.

The Vietnamese speech in this release represents that spoken in the North, North-Central, Central and Southern dialect regions in Vietnam. The gender distribution among speakers is approximately equal; speakers' ages range from 16 years to 64 years. Calls were made using different telephones (e.g., mobile, landline) from a variety of environments including the street, a home or office, a public place, and inside a vehicle.

Transcripts are encoded in UTF-8.

IARPA Babel Vietnamese Language Pack IARPA-babel107b-v0.7 is distributed via web download.

2017 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. 2017 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee..
*
(3) MWE-Aware English Dependency Corpus was developed by the Nara Institute of Science and Technology Computational Linguistics Laboratory and consists of English compound function words annotated in dependency format. The data is derived from the Wall Street Journal portion of OntoNotes Release 5.0 (LDC2013T19).
Compound function words are a type of multiword expression (MWE). MWEs are groups of tokens that can be treated as a single semantic or syntactic unit. Doing so facilitates natural language processing tasks such as constituency and dependency parsing.
MWE-Aware English Dependency Corpus is distributed via web download.
2017 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus. 2017 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee..
*
(4) GALE Phase 3 and 4 Chinese Web Parallel Text was developed by LDC and contains Chinese source text and corresponding English translations selected from weblog and newsgroup data collected by LDC and translated by LDC or under its direction.
The data includes 88 source-translation document pairs, comprising 67,514 tokens of Chinese source text and its English translation.
GALE Phase 3 and 4 Chinese Web Parallel Text is distributed via web download.

2017 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus. 2017 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.