LDC 2019 October Newsletter

Membership Year 2020 Publication Preview

LDC data and commercial technology development 

New Publications: 
BOLT English Treebank - Discussion Forum 
Polish Speech Database 
2016 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set 
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Membership Year 2020 Publication Preview 

The 2020 Membership Year is just around the corner and plans for next year’s publications are in progress. Among the expected releases are:

Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) Annotation Release 3.0: semantic treebank of over 59,000 English natural language sentences from broadcast conversations, newswire, weblogs and web discussion forums; updates the second version (LDC2017T10) with new annotations

TAC KBP: English sentiment slot filling, surprise slot filling, nugget detection and coreference, and event argument data in all languages (English, Chinese and Spanish)

DEFT Chinese ERE: Chinese discussion forum data annotated for entities, relations and events

LibriVox Spanish: 73 hours of Spanish audiobook read speech and transcripts

IARPA Babel Language Packs (telephone speech and transcripts): languages include Dhuluo, Javanese and Mongolian

HAVIC Med Training data: web video, metadata, and annotations for developing multimedia systems

RATS Speaker Identification: conversational telephone speech in Levantine Arabic, Pashto, Urdu, Farsi and Dari on degraded audio signals with annotation of speech segments for speaker identification

BOLT: discussion forums, SMS/chat, conversational telephone speech, word-aligned, tagged and co-reference data in all languages (Chinese, Egyptian Arabic, and English)

Check your inbox in the coming weeks for more information about membership renewal. 

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.

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New publications:  

(1) BOLT English Treebank - Discussion Forum was developed by LDC and consists of 268,907 tokens of English web discussion forum data with part-of-speech and syntactic structure annotations collected for the DARPA BOLT (Broad Operational Language Translation) program.

Part-of-speech and treebank annotation conformed to Penn Treebank II style, incorporating changes to those guidelines that were developed under the GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) program. Supplementary guidelines for English treebanks and web text are included with this release.

The source data is English discussion forum web text collected by LDC in 2011 and 2012. A subset of that data -- 702 files representing 268,907 tokens -- was selected for the treebank and annotated for word-level tokenization, part-of-speech and syntactic structure. The unannotated English source data is released as BOLT English Discussion Forums (LDC2017T11).

BOLT English Treebank - Discussion Forum 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.

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(2) Polish Speech Database was developed by VoiceLab and consists of 263,424 utterances of Polish speech data from 200 speakers, totaling approximately 280 hours, and corresponding transcripts.

Data collection was performed in Poland. Speakers were asked to record themselves reading text on a website for at least 60 minutes from their home computer while using a headset. The read text was comprised of sentences covering most speech sounds in Polish.

This release includes speaker metadata. There were 103 male speakers and 97 female speakers, ranging from 15 – 60 years of age; most speakers were in the 15 – 30 years age range.

Polish Speech Database 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.

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(3) 2016 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set was developed by LDC and NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and contains approximately 340 hours of short segments of Tagalog, Cantonese, Cebuano and Mandarin telephone speech used as development and test data in the NIST-sponsored 2016 Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE). 

As in previous evaluations, SRE16 focused on telephone speech recorded over a variety of handset types for the training and test conditions. In addition to development and evaluation data, this corpus also contains trial lists, their associated keys, tables containing metadata information, and evaluation documentation.

The telephone speech data was drawn from the Call My Net 2015 Corpus collected by LDC. Native speakers of Tagalog, Cantonese, Cebuano or Mandarin (220 unique speakers) made a total of ten telephone calls each to people within their existing social networks. Speakers were encouraged to use different telephone instruments in a variety of acoustic settings and were instructed to talk for 8 - 10 minutes per call on a topic of their choice. All conversations were collected outside North America.

 

2016 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set 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.

LDC 2018 June Newsletter

LDC Catalog certified as CoreTrustSeal data repository

LDC data and commercial technology development

New Publications:

BOLT Chinese SMS/Chat

Multi-Language Conversational Telephone Speech 2011 -- Central European

TAC KBP English Entity Linking - Comprehensive Training and Evaluation Data 2009-2013

IARPA Babel Cebuano Language Pack IARPA-babel301b-v2.0b
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LDC Catalog certified as CoreTrustSeal data repository

LDC is pleased to announce that the Catalog has been awarded the CoreTrustSeal for recognition as a trustworthy data repository. This means that the Catalog meets a series of standards covering data access, rights management, curation, and storage developed by the ISCU World Data System and the Data Seal of Approval. LDC joins the other 136 certified repositories around the globe in the commitment to promote sustainable and trustworthy data infrastructures.  

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 Chinese SMS/Chat was developed by LDC and consists of naturally-occurring Short Message Service (SMS) and Chat (CHT) data collected through data donations and live collection involving native speakers of Chinese. The corpus contains 14,877 conversations totaling 3,005,810 words across 497,543 messages.

The BOLT (Broad Operational Language Translation) program developed machine translation and information retrieval for less formal genres, focusing particularly on user-generated content. LDC supported the BOLT program by collecting informal data sources – discussion forums, text messaging, and chat – in Chinese, Egyptian Arabic, and English. The collected data was translated and annotated for various tasks including word alignment, treebanking, propbanking, and co-reference. The data in this release was collected using two methods: new collection via LDC's collection platform, and donation of SMS or chat archives from BOLT collection participants.

BOLT Chinese SMS/Chat is distributed via web download.

2018 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 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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(2) Multi-Language Conversational Telephone Speech 2011 -- Central European was developed by LDC and is comprised of approximately 44 hours of telephone speech in two distinct language varieties of Central Europe: Czech and Slovak.

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. Human auditors labeled the calls for callee gender, dialect type, and noise.

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

·        Slavic Group (LDC2016S11)

·        Turkish (LDC2017S09)

·        South Asian (LDC2017S14)

·        Central Asian (LDC2018S03)

Multi-Language Conversational Telephone Speech 2011 -- Central European is distributed via web download.

2018 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 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) TAC KBP English Entity Linking - Comprehensive Training and Evaluation Data 2009-2013 was developed by LDC and contains training and evaluation data produced in support of the TAC KBP English Entity Linking tasks in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013. It includes queries and gold standard entity type information, Knowledge Base links, and equivalence class clusters for NIL entities. Also included are the source documents for the queries, specifically, English newswire, discussion forum, and web data. The corresponding knowledge base is available as TAC KBP Reference Knowledge Base (LDC2014T16). Also included in this package are the results of an Entity Linking IAA (Inter-Annotator Agreement) study conducted in 2010.

TAC KBP encourages the development of systems that can match entities mentioned in natural texts with those appearing in a knowledge base and extract novel information about entities from a document collection and add it to a new or existing knowledge base. English Entity Linking was first conducted as part of the 2009 TAC KBP evaluations. Its goal is to measure systems' ability to determine whether an entity, specified by a query, has a matching node in a reference knowledge base (KB) and, if so, to create a link between the two. If there is no matching node for a query entity in the KB, EL systems are required to cluster the mention together with others referencing the same entity.

TAC KBP English Entity Linking - Comprehensive Training and Evaluation Data 2009-2013 is distributed via web download.

2018 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 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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(4) IARPA Babel Cebuano Language Pack IARPA-babel301b-v2.0b was developed by Appen for the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) Babel program. It contains approximately 191 hours of Cebuano conversational and scripted telephone speech collected in 2013 and 2014 along with corresponding transcripts.

The Cebuano speech in this release represents that spoken in the Cebu-North Kana, Sialo, and Mindanao dialect regions of the Philippines. The gender distribution among speakers is approximately equal; speakers' ages range from 16 years to 75 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 Cebuano Language Pack IARPA-babel301b-v2.0b is available 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 2017 Newsletter

LDC celebrates 25 years

LDC data and commercial technology development

New publications:

2010 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set

BOLT Egyptian Arabic SMS/Chat and Transliteration 

CHiME2 Grid 

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LDC celebrates 25 years

April 2017 marks the beginning of LDC’s 25^th year as the leader in language resource development and distribution. Founded in 1992, the Consortium has grown from a data repository to a vibrant data center that creates, shares and archives language resources. The Catalog continues to grow, boasting over 700 titles in more than 90 languages. With the support of members, licensees, sponsors and collaborators, LDC has distributed over 120,000 copies of data to more than 3,500 organizations worldwide. Our heartfelt thanks for your support as we continue our mission to provide large quantities of diverse data, research program support and high quality member services.

LDC data and commercial technology development

Any organization wishing to use LDC data to develop or test products for commercialization or use LDC data in any commercial product or for any commercial purpose, must first license the data as a For-Profit Member. Once the data is licensed under the For-Profit Membership, the organization retains perpetual rights to use the data for commercial technology development. LDC data users should consult corpus-specific license agreements for limitations on the use of certain corpora. Visit our Licensing page for more information. 

New Corpora

(1) 2010 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set was developed by LDC and NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). It contains 2,255 hours of American English telephone speech and interview speech recorded over a microphone channel used as test data in the NIST-sponsored 2010 Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE).

The telephone speech segments include two-channel excerpts of approximately 10 seconds and 5 minutes. There are also summed-channel excerpts in the range of 5 minutes. The microphone excerpts are 3-15 minutes in duration. As in prior evaluations, intervals of silence were not removed.

The 2010 evaluation includes not only conversational telephone speech (CTS) recorded over ordinary telephone channels for the core training and test conditions, but also CTS and conversational interview speech recorded over a room microphone channel. Unlike prior evaluations, some of the conversational telephone style speech was collected in a manner to produce particularly high, or particularly low, vocal effort on the part of the speaker of interest. In addition to evaluation data, this package also consists of answer keys, trial and train files, development data and evaluation documentation.

2010 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set is distributed via hard drive.

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.

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(2) BOLT Egyptian Arabic SMS/Chat and Transliteration was developed by LDC and consists of naturally-occurring Short Message Service (SMS) and Chat (CHT) data collected through data donations and live collection involving native speakers of Egyptian Arabic. The corpus contains 5,691 conversations totaling 1,029,248 words across 262,026 messages. Messages were natively written in either Arabic orthography or romanized Arabizi. A total of 1,856 Arabizi conversations (287,022 words) were transliterated from the original romanized Arabizi script into standard Arabic orthography and then reviewed, corrected and normalized by LDC annotators according to "Conventional Orthography for Dialectal Arabic" (CODA).

The BOLT (Broad Operational Language Translation) program developed machine translation and information retrieval for less formal genres, focusing particularly on user-generated content. LDC supported the BOLT program by collecting informal data sources -- discussion forums, text messaging and chat -- in Chinese, Egyptian Arabic and English. The collected data was translated and annotated for various tasks including word alignment, treebanking, propbanking and co-reference.

BOLT Egyptian Arabic SMS/Chat and Transliteration 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.

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(3) CHiME2 Grid was developed as part of The 2nd CHiME Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge and contains approximately 120 hours of English speech from a noisy living room environment. The CHiME Challenges focus on distant-microphone automatic speech recognition (ASR) in real-world environments.

CHiME2 Grid reflects the small vocabulary track of the CHiME2 Challenge. The target utterances were taken from the Grid corpus and consist of 34 speakers reading simple 6-word sequences. The Data is divided into training, development and test sets.

CHiME2 Grid 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.