LDC 2018 April Newsletter

LDC at ICASSP 2018

LDC at the Philadelphia Science Carnival

New Publications:

Concretely Annotated New York Times

H2, E2, ERK1 Children's Writing

TRAD Arabic-French Parallel Text -- Newsgroup

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LDC at ICASSP 2018

LDC will be exhibiting at ICASSP 2018, held this year April 15-20 in Calgary, Canada. Stop by booth B2 to learn more about recent developments at the Consortium and new publications.

Also, be on the lookout for the following presentations featuring LDC work:

Enhancement and Analysis of Conversational Speech: JSALT 2017
Tuesday, April 17, 16:00 - 18:00
Session: Speech Analysis

Leveraging LSTM Models for Overlap Detection in Multi-Party Meetings
Wednesday, April 18, 13:30 - 15:30
Session: Speaker Diarization & Identification

A Novel LSTM-based Speech Preprocessor for Speaker Diarization in Realistic Mismatch Conditions
Wednesday, April 18, 13:30 - 15:30
Session: Speaker Diarization & Identification

LDC will post conference updates via our Twitter feed and Facebook page. We hope to see you there!  

LDC at the Philadelphia Science Carnival

LDC will share the fun of language with the community on Saturday, April 28, with a booth at the Philadelphia Science Carnival. Visitors will enjoy three language-oriented educational activities that include a language identification game and Chinese character recognition.

The Philadelphia Science Carnival is an annual event organized by Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute to acquaint children and adults with the joys of science.

New publications:

(1) Concretely Annotated New York Times was developed by Johns Hopkins University's Human Language Technology Center of Excellence. It adds multiple kinds and instances of automatically-generated syntactic, semantic, and coreference annotations to The New York Times Annotated Corpus (LDC2008T19). Concrete is a schema for representing structured, hierarchical, and overlapping linguistic annotations. This release provides multiple tool outputs producing the same annotation types as different annotation theories under a shared tokenization. Concretely Annotated New York Times contains all of the 1.8 million articles in The New York Times Annotated Corpus.

Concretely Annotated New York Times is distributed via hard drive.

2018 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. 2018 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Any organization that licensed The New York Times Annotated Corpus (LDC2008T19) may request a copy of Concretely Annotated New York Times (LDC2018T12) for a $250 media fee.  Non-members may license this data for a fee.

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(2) H2, E2, ERK1 Children's Writing was developed by the Cooperative State University Baden-Württemberg, University of Education. It consists of approximately 2,000 texts written over four months by 173 German school children age six through eleven years. The data in this corpus was collected by elementary schools in Baden Württemberg, Germany, and digitized at the Cooperative State University during the 2016/2017 school year. Three second, third, and fourth grade classrooms participated in the collection. Texts were written within regular class settings. The students were presented with a picture and were asked to write a story to describe the picture or, if unable to write a text, to list what they saw in the picture.

There were 173 total participants. 100 students were multilingual, and further metadata is available for 166 of the 173 children. The following is included for each text in the database: school week of collection; school type; age; gender; grade/classroom; language spoken at home; and school materials used.

LDC has also released H1 Children's Writing (LDC2016T01).

H2, E2, ERK1 Children's Writing is distributed via web download.

2018 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. 2018 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) TRAD Arabic-French Parallel Text -- Newsgroup was developed by ELDA as part of the PEA-TRAD project. It contains French translations of a subset of approximately 10,000 Arabic words from GALE Phase 1 Arabic Newsgroup Parallel Text - Part 1 (LDC2009T03). The PEA-TRAD project (Translation as a Support for Document Analysis) was supported by the French Ministry of Defense (DGA). Its purpose was to develop speech-to-speech translation technology for multiple languages (e.g., Arabic, Chinese, Pashto) from a variety of domains. This release consists of 398 segments (translations units) from 17 documents. The source data is Arabic newsgroup text collected and translated into English by LDC for the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) program.

LDC has also released TRAD Chinese-French Parallel Text -- Blog (LDC2018T02).

TRAD Arabic-French Parallel Text -- Newsgroup is distributed via web download.

2018 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. 2018 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

LDC April 2016 Newsletter

New publications:

H1 Children's Writing

GALE Phase 4 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Parallel Sentences

HAVIC Pilot Transcription

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New Corpora

(1) H1 Children's Writing was developed by the Cooperative State University Baden-Württemberg, University of Education. It consists of 996 texts written over three months by 88 German school children age seven through eleven years.

Texts were written within regular class settings. The students were presented with a picture and were asked to write a story, to describe the picture or if unable to write a text, to list what they saw in the picture. The pictures were designed to enhance the output with respect to important spelling error categories, namely, the marking of short vowels with a silent consonant letter and the correct spelling of the long vowel. The children were allowed at least 15 minutes to write the texts. This exercise was repeated weekly for 12 weeks.

Most of the participants were multilingual. The metadata with this releases includes: school week of collection; school type (always elementary school); age; gender; grade/classroom; language spoken at home; and school materials used for German (Jojo).

In all, 996 texts representing 62,764 tokens were collected. The texts were digitized in two forms: (1) the original text, including all errors (achieved), and (2) the intended (target) text, where all spelling errors were removed. Annotations were added to both the achieved text and the target text to distinguish words that should not be analyzed for spelling errors, such as names or foreign words. For sentence-level analysis, syntax errors were annotated by marking substitutions, deletions and insertions at the word level. In such cases, the used word was analyzed for spelling, and the correct word was used for sentence structure analysis.

Original handwriting is presented as pdf documents and the converted text as UTF-8 plain text in csv documents.

H1 Children's Writing is distributed via web download.

2016 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2016 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) GALE Phase 4 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Parallel Sentences was developed by LDC. Along with other corpora, the parallel text in this release comprised training data for Phase 4 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) Program. This corpus contains Modern Standard Arabic source sentences and corresponding English translations selected from broadcast conversation data collected by LDC in 2007 and 2008 and transcribed and translated by LDC or under its direction.

The data includes 170 source-translation document pairs, comprising 44,064 words (Arabic source) of translated data. Data is drawn from 45 distinct Arabic broadcast conversation sources.

GALE Phase 4 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Parallel Sentences is distributed via web download.

2016 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2016 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) HAVIC Pilot Transcription was developed by LDC and is comprised of approximately 72 hours of user-generated videos with transcripts based on the English speech audio extracted from the videos. This data set was created in collaboration with NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) as part of the HAVIC (the Heterogeneous Audio Visual Internet Collection) project, the goal of which is to advance multimodal event detection and related technologies.

LDC has developed a large, heterogeneous, annotated multimodal corpus for HAVIC that has been used in the NIST-sponsored MED (Multimedia Event Detection) task for several years. HAVIC Pilot Transcription supported an experiment to produce a verbatim transcript (quick and rich transcription) based on audio extracted from user-generated videos. It contains the pilot transcripts for selected MED 2011 video files as well as the associated videos.

Annotators generated the transcripts using XTrans, which supports manual transcription across multiple channels, languages and platforms. HAVIC transcription guidelines are included in the documentation for this release. All transcription files are in .tdf format, a plain-text, flat-table format with 13 tab-delimited fields. All video files are in .mp4 format (h264), with varying bit-rates and levels of audio fidelity and video resolution.

HAVIC Pilot Transcription is distributed via web download.

2016 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2016 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 October Newsletter

In this newsletter:

Fall 2015 LDC Data Scholarship recipients

New publications:

ACE 2007 Spanish DevTest - Pilot Evaluation

GALE Phase 4 Chinese  Broadcast News Parallel Sentences
Karlsruhe Children's Text

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Fall 2015 LDC Data Scholarship recipients

Congratulations to the recipients of LDC's Fall 2015 data scholarships:

Anthony Beylerian - Keio University (Japan), MSc, Informatics and Computer Science.  Anthony has been awarded a copy of OntoNotes for his work in word sense disambiguation.

Siti Binte Faizal - Newcastle University (UK), PhD candidate, Speech and Language Sciences.  Siti has been awarded a copy of Levantine Arabic QT Training Speech and Text for her work in psycholinguistics.

Sara El-Kafrawy - Ain Shams University (Egypt), MSc candidate, Computer and Information Sciences.  Sara has been awarded a copy of GALE Arabic English Word Alignment and Arabic Gigaword for her work in machine translation.

Marwa Hadj Salah - University of Sfax (Tunisia), PhD candidate, Computer Science.  Marwa has been awarded a copy of Arabic English Parallel News and Arabic News Translation Text for her work in machine translation.

Tomoaki Goto - University of Tokyo (Japan), PhD candidate, Linguistics.  Tomoaki has been awarded a copy of Arabic Newswire English Translation for his work in syntax.

Richard Metzger - Pennsylvania State University (USA), PhD candidate, Electrical Engineering.  Richard has been awarded a copy of 2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Training Part 2 and Test for his work in speaker recognition.

Jun Ren - Massey University (New Zealand), PhD, Engineering.  Jun has been awarded a copy of TORGO Dysarthric Articulation for his work in speaker recognition.

Gozde Sahin - Istanbul Technical University (Turkey), PhD candidate, Computer Engineering and Informatics.  Gozde has been been awarded a copy of 2009 CoNLL Parts 1 and 2 for her work in semantic role labeling.

Alexey Sholokhov - University of Eastern Finland (Finland), PhD candidate, Computer Sciences.  Alexey has been awarded a copy of RATS Speech Activity Detection for his work in speaker verification.

Stefan Watson - University of the West Indies (Jamaica),  PhD candidate, Physics.  Stefan has been awarded a copy of CMU Kids for his work in phonology and speech recognition.

For program information visit the Data Scholarship page. 

New publications         

(1) ACE2007 Spanish DevTest - Pilot Evaluation was developed by LDC. This publication contains the complete set of Spanish development and test data to support the 2007 Automatic Content Extraction (ACE) technology evaluation, namely, newswire data annotated for entities and temporal expressions.

The objective of the ACE program was to develop automatic content extraction technology to support automatic processing of human language in text form from a variety of sources including newswire, broadcast programming and weblogs. In the 2007 evaluation, participants were tested on system performance for the recognition of entities, values, temporal expressions, relations, and events in Chinese and English and for the recognition of entities and temporal expressions in Arabic and Spanish. LDC's work in the ACE program is described in more detail on the LDC ACE project pages.

LDC has also released ACE 2007 Multilingual Training Corpus (LDC2014T18) which contains the Arabic and Spanish training data used in the 2007 evaluation.

The data consists of newswire material published in May 2005 from the following sources: Agence France Press, The Associated Press and Xinhua News Agency.

All files were annotated by two human annotators working independently. Discrepancies between the two annotations were adjudicated by a senior team member resulting in a gold standard file.

There are three annotation directories for each newswire story that contain an identical copy of the source text in SGML format and two associated annotated versions in XML format and tab delimited format. All text is UTF-8 encoded.

ACE 2007 Spanish DevTest - Pilot Evaluation is distributed via web download.

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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(2) GALEPhase 4 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Sentences was developed by LDC. Along with other corpora, the parallel text in this release comprised training data for Phase 4 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) Program. This corpus contains Chinese source sentences and corresponding English translations selected from broadcast news data collected by LDC in 2008 and transcribed and translated by LDC or under its direction.

GALE Phase 4 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Sentences includes 40 source-translation document pairs, comprising 156,429 tokens of Chinese source text and its English translation. Data is drawn from eight distinct Chinese programs broadcast in 2008 from China Central TV, a national and international broadcaster in Mainland China; and Voice of America, a U.S. government-funded broadcast programmer. The programs in this release feature news programs on current events topics.

The data was transcribed by LDC staff and/or transcription vendors under contract to LDC in accordance with the Quick Rich Transcription guidelines developed by LDC. Transcribers indicated sentence boundaries in addition to transcribing the text. Sentences were selected for translation in two steps. First, files were chosen using sentence selection scripts provided by GALE program participants SRI International and IBM. The output was then manually reviewed by LDC staff to eliminate problematic sentences. Selected files were reformatted into a human-readable translation format and assigned to translation vendors. Translators followed LDC's Chinese to English translation guidelines and were provided with the full source documents containing the target sentences for their reference. Bilingual LDC staff performed quality control procedures on the completed translations.

Source data and translations are distributed in TDF format. TDF files are tab-delimited files containing one segment of text along with meta information about that segment. Each field in the TDF file is described in TDF_format.txt. All data are encoded in UTF-8.

GALE Phase 4 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Sentences is distributed via web download.

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) KarlsruheChildren's Text was developed by the Cooperative State University Baden-Württemberg, University of Education and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. It consists of over 14,000 freely written, German sentences from more than 1,700 school children in grades one through eight.

The data collection was conducted in 2011-2013 at elementary and secondary schools in and around Karlsruhe, Germany. Students were asked to write as verbose a text as possible. Those in grades one to four were read two stories and were then asked to write their own stories. Students in grades five through eight were instructed to write on a specific theme, such as "Imagine the world in 20 years. What has changed?”. The goal of the collection was to use the data to develop a spelling error classification system.

Annotators converted the handwritten text into digital form with all errors committed by the writers; they also created an orthographically correct version of every sentence. Metadata about the text was gathered, including the circumstances under which it was collected, information about the student writer and background about spelling lessons in the particular class. In a second step, the students' spelling errors were annotated into general groupings: grapheme level, syllable level, morphology and syntax. The files were anonymized in a third step.

This release also contains metadata regarding the writers’ language biography, teaching methodology, age, gender and school year. The average age of the participants was 11 years, and the gender distribution was nearly equal. Original handwriting is presented as JPEG format image files and the converted annotated text as UTF-8 plain text. Metadata is contained within each text file.

Karlsruhe Children's Text is distributed via web download.

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.