LDC January 2026 Newsletter

Renew your LDC membership today 

New publications:

CALLHOME Japanese Second Edition

CALLHOME Japanese Lexicon Second Edition

MATERIAL Swahili-English Language Pack
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Renew your LDC membership today 
The importance of curated resources for language-related education, research and technology development drives LDC’s mission to create them, to accept data contributions from researchers across the globe and to broadly share such resources through the LDC Catalog. LDC members enjoy no-cost access to new corpora released annually, as well as the ability to license legacy data sets from among our 1000 holdings at reduced fees. Ensure that your data needs continue to be met by renewing your LDC membership or by joining the Consortium today.

Now through March 2, 2026, any organization that joins the Consortium or renews their membership will receive a 10% discount off the 2026 membership fee. Membership remains the most economical way to access current and past LDC releases. Consult Join LDC for more details on membership options and benefits. 

New publications:

CALLHOME Japanese Second Edition was developed by LDC and contains 49 hours of speech from 120 telephone conversations between native Japanese speakers. This publication is a re-release of the original CALLHOME Japanese collection, combining CALLHOME Japanese Speech (LDC96S37) and CALLHOME Japanese Transcripts (LDC96T18)with additional transcription and updated directory structure, file formats, and documentation.

This corpus contains the 120 calls from CALLHOME Japanese Speech which represented training and development data and a subset of evaluation data. Participants spoke on topics of their choice in a single telephone call lasting up to 30 minutes. Calls were manually audited for language, recording quality, channel characteristics, dialect, and region. For this second edition, all audio was converted from SPHERE files to FLAC format, and the original training/development/test partitioning was removed. 

This release also features revised transcripts conforming to updated LDC transcription guidelines that addressed normalization of annotation formats, standardization of speaker-produced and background noises, application of foreign-language marking, whitespace cleanup, and corrections and consistency fixes.

The CALLHOME series consists of telephone conversations and transcripts developed by LDC and Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, in support of research in speaker identification, language identification and related technologies. Languages in the series include American English, Egyptian Arabic, German, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish.

2026 members can access this corpus through their LDC accounts. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

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CALLHOME Japanese Lexicon Second Edition was developed by LDC and contains 80,688 Japanese words with morphological, phonological and stress information. This second edition updates file formats, directory structure and documentation. The first edition is available as CALLHOME Japanese Lexicon (LDC96L17). The words in the lexicon were derived from 80 transcripts representing telephone conversations between native Japanese speakers contained in CALLHOME Japanese Second Edition (LDC2026S02). 

The lexicon contains seven tab-separated information fields: (1) headword: orthographic form in kanji or katakana or hiragana (if only written in hiragana); (2) hiragana: orthographic form in hiragana; (3) romanization: orthographic form in romaji; (4) pron: pronunciation of the headword; (5) morph: morphological analysis of the headword; (6) train freq: frequency of the headword in the transcripts; and (7) gloss: glosses of the headword. This release also includes a pronunciation dictionary derived from the lexicon in CMUdict format and the grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) tools used to automatically generate pronunciations for the original lexicon.

2026 members can access this corpus through their LDC accounts provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

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MATERIAL Swahili-English Language Pack was developed by Appen for the IARPA MATERIAL program and contains 112 hours of Swahili conversational telephone speech, transcripts, English translations, annotations and queries. Calls were made using different telephones (e.g., mobile, landline) from a variety of environments. Transcripts cover approximately 30% of the speech files, 3% of which were translated into English. This release also includes domain annotations, English queries and their relevance annotations. 

The MATERIAL program focused on underserved languages with the ultimate goal to build cross language information retrieval systems to find speech and text content using English search queries.

2026 members can access this corpus through their LDC accounts provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

LDC January 2025 Newsletter

Renew your LDC membership today 

New publications:

Iraqi Arabic – English Lexical Database

LORELEI Hungarian Representative Language Pack

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Renew your LDC membership today
The importance of curated resources for language-related education, research and technology development drives LDC’s mission to create them, to accept data contributions from researchers across the globe and to broadly share such resources through the LDC Catalog. LDC members enjoy no-cost access to new corpora released annually, as well as the ability to license legacy data sets from among our 960+ holdings at reduced fees. Ensure that your data needs continue to be met by renewing your LDC membership or by joining the Consortium today.

Now through March 3, 2025, 2024 members receive a 10% discount on 2025 membership, and new or returning organizations receive a 5% discount. Membership remains the most economical way to access current and past LDC releases. Consult Join LDC for more details on membership options and benefits. 

New publications

Iraqi Arabic - English Lexical Database was developed by LDC. It has six interrelated tables presenting over 67,000 Iraqi Arabic words as orthographic forms in Arabic script and pronunciation forms in IPA format, along with more than 120,000 English tokens.

This release is the result of a collaboration with Georgetown University Press to enhance and update three dialectal Arabic dictionaries -- Iraqi, Moroccan and Syrian -- originally published in the 1960s. The Georgetown Dictionary of Iraqi Arabic was published in 2013. That work was based on, and expanded, two dictionaries, A Dictionary of Iraqi Arabic: English-Arabic (Clarity, Stowasser and Wolfe, eds., 2003) and A Dictionary of Iraqi Arabic: Arabic-English (Woodhead and Beene, eds., 2003).

The several enhancements developed by LDC in the updated and enhanced dictionary and the lexical database included facilitating comparisons across Arabic dialects and Modern Standard Arabic by providing Arabic script spellings and IPA pronunciations to Iraqi words and phrases; promoting ease of use by language learners and researchers by developing reasonable orthographic conventions for applying the Arabic alphabet to the dialect; and facilitating a user's understanding of morphological and lexical relations by adding information on the linguistic structures of Iraqi Arabic.

The documentation accompanying this release includes instructions for combining into one database the tables in this corpus with the tables in Moroccan Arabic - English Lexical Database LDC2023L01.

2025 members can access this corpus through their LDC accounts provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

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LORELEI Hungarian Representative Language Pack is comprised of over 686 million words of Hungarian monolingual text, 165,000 words of which were translated into English, 2.3 million words of found Hungarian-English parallel text, and 87,000 Hungarian words translated from English data. Approximately 72,500 words were annotated for named entities and over 25,000 words were annotated for full entity (including nominals and pronouns), entity linking and situation frames (identifying entities, needs and issues); over 17,000 words have simple semantic annotation; and close to 10,000 words were annotated for noun phrase chunking. Data was collected from discussion forum, news, reference, social network, and weblogs.

The LORELEI (Low Resource Languages for Emergent Incidents) program was concerned with building human language technology for low resource languages in the context of emergent situations. Representative languages were selected to provide broad typological coverage.

The knowledge base for entity linking annotation is available separately as LORELEI Entity Detection and Linking Knowledge Base (LDC2020T10).

2025 members can access this corpus through their LDC accounts. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

LDC October 2024 Newsletter

LDC/Penn receives US Dept of Education research grant 

Membership year 2025 publication preview 

Fall 2024 data scholarship recipients 

New publications:

RST Continuity Corpus

MultiTACRED

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LDC/Penn receives US Dept of Education research grant 
LDC and Penn’s Graduate School of Education and Department of Computer and Information Science are part of a team that was recently awarded a $10 million grant from the US Department of Education to develop the Using Generative Artificial Intelligence for Reading R&D Center (U-GAIN Reading) which will explore using generative AI to improve elementary school reading instruction for English learners. Led by the education nonprofit Digital Promise, U-GAIN Reading will build on an existing research-based tutoring platform, Amira Learning, that is used by more than 1 million students each year. The LDC/Penn team will contribute expertise in computational linguistics, computer science, and learning analytics. An evaluation team at MDRC will measure learner outcomes both to improve the R&D and to benchmark its eventual impacts. Additional experts in the science of reading, ethics, and strategies for national impact will support the project’s work. Data developed in the project will be shared with the community through the LDC Catalog.

Membership year 2025 publication preview 
The 2025 membership year is approaching and plans for next year’s publications are in progress. Among the expected releases are:  

• Iraqi Arabic – English Lexical Database: a set of six interrelated tables (roots, lemmas, wordforms, multi-word expressions, English definitions, example phrases) presenting each Iraqi Arabic word in Arabic script and IPA format, a result of LDC’s collaboration with Georgetown University Press to enhance and update three dialectal Arabic dictionaries  
• AIDA topic source data and annotations: multimodal source data and annotations in multiple languages (Russian, English, Spanish) for information and entity extraction 
• 2015 NIST Language Recognition Evaluation Test Set: 164,000+ segments of conversational telephone speech and broadcast narrow band speech in six linguistic varieties (Arabic, Spanish, English, Chinese, Slavic, French) representing 20 languages, used in NIST’s 2015 language recognition evaluation 
• BOLT CALLFRIEND CALLHOME CTS Audio, Transcripts and Translations: previously unpublished Chinese and Egyptian Arabic telephone conversations from the CALLFRIEND and CALLHOME collections, with transcripts and translations developed by LDC for the DARPA BOLT program 
• Chinese Sentence Pattern Structure Treebank: 5,000+ sentences from ancient and modern Chinese texts with syntactic annotation based on sentence constituent analysis, developed by Beijing Normal University and Peking University  
• IARPA MATERIAL language packs: conversational telephone speech, transcripts, English translations, annotations and queries in multiple languages (e.g., Georgian, Kazakh, Lithuanian)
• LORELEI: representative and incident language packs containing monolingual text, bi-text, translations, annotations, supplemental resources and related tools in various languages (e.g., Hungarian, Hindi, Amharic, Somali) 

Check your inbox for more information about membership renewal.

Fall 2024 data scholarship recipients 
Congratulations to the recipients of LDC's Fall 2024 data scholarships:

Yomma Gamaleldin: Alexandria University (Egypt): Master’s student, Computer and Systems Engineering Department. Yomma is awarded a copy of Qatari Corpus of Argumentative Writing LDC2022T04 for her work in Arabic automated essay scoring.

Arhane Mahaganapathy: Jaffna University (Sri Lanka): Master’s student, Department of Computer Science. Ahrane is awarded copies of IARPA Babel Tamil Language Pack LDC2017S13 and Multi-Language Telephone Speech 2011 – South Asian LDC2017S14 for her work in Tamil speech-to-text systems.

Sivashanth Suthakar: Jaffna University (Sri Lanka): Master’s student, Department of Computer Science. Sivashanth is awarded copies of CAMIO Transcription Languages LDC2022T07 and LORELEI Tamil Representative Language Pack LDC2023T03 for his work in Tamil OCR systems.

Oshan Yalegama: University of Moratuwa (Sri Lanka): BSc, Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering. Oshan is awarded copies of CSR-I (WSJ0) Complete LDC93S6A and TIMIT Acoustic-Phonetic Continuous Speech Corpus LDC93S1 for his work in audio signal processing.

Samer Mohammed Yaseen: Sana’a University (Yemen): PhD candidate, Faculty of Computer and Information Technology. Samer is awarded a copy of Arabic Newswire Part 1 LDC2001T55 for his work in Arabic information retrieval. 

New publications:

RST Continuity Corpus was developed at Åbo Akademi University and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and contains annotations for continuity dimensions added to RST Discourse Treebank (LDC2002T07). RST Discourse Treebank is a collection of English news texts from the Penn Treebank annotated for rhetorical relations under the RST (Rhetorical Structure Theory) framework. In RST Continuity Corpus, the relations are annotated for the seven continuity dimensions: time, space, reference, action, perspective, modality, and speech act. The relations are also annotated for polarity, order of segments, nuclearity, and context.

2024 members can access this corpus through their LDC accounts. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

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MultiTACRED was developed by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) Speech and Language Technology Lab and is a machine translation of TAC Relation Extraction Dataset (LDC2018T24) (TACRED) into twelve languages with projected entity annotations. TACRED is a large-scale relation extraction dataset containing 106,264 examples built over English newswire and web text used in the NIST TAC KBP English slot filling evaluations during the period 2009-2014. The training and evaluation data for the TAC KBP slot filling tasks was developed by the Linguistic Data Consortium.

TACRED training, development and test splits were translated into Arabic, Chinese, Finnish, French, German, Hindi,  Hungarian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish using  DeepL or Google Translate. The test split was back-translated into English to generate machine-translated English test data.

TACRED annotations are specified by token offsets. For translation, tokens were concatenated with white space, and the entity offsets were converted into XML-style markers to denote argument.

2024 members can access this corpus through their LDC accounts. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

LDC November 2021 Newsletter

Join LDC for Membership Year 2022 

Spring 2022 Data Scholarship Application Deadline 

New Publications:

BOLT Egyptian Arabic PropBank and Sense – Discussion Forum, SMS/Chat, and Conversational Telephone Speech

Second DIHARD Challenge Development – Eleven Sources

Second DIHARD Challenge Development - SEEDLingS

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Join LDC for Membership Year 2022

Membership Year 2022 (MY2022) is open and discounts are available for those who keep their membership current and join early. Current MY2021 members who renew their LDC membership before March 1, 2022 will receive a 10% discount off the membership fee. New or returning organizations will receive a 5% discount when joining by March 1.

In addition to receiving new publications, current LDC members also enjoy the benefit of licensing older data from our Catalog of 900 holdings at reduced fees. Current-year for-profit members may use most data for commercial applications.

Plans for MY2022 publications are in progress. Among the expected releases are:

• 2017 NIST OpenSAT Pilot – SSSF: real world operational English speech data, transcripts and annotation files used in the speech activity detection, automatic speech recognition, and keyword search tasks of the 2017 OpenSAT Pilot evaluation

• AttImam: 2000 attribution relations applied to Arabic newswire text from Arabic Treebank: Part 1 v 4.1 LDC2010T13

• Samrómur Icelandic Speech: 145 hours of Icelandic prompted speech from 8000 speakers covering text from novels, news, plays, and location names

• MASRI Synthetic: 99 hours of synthesized Maltese speech from various genres with transcripts 

• HAVIC MED Novel Tests: thousands of hours of event and background user-generated videos with annotation and metadata used for the 2015 Multimedia Event Detection task

• DIHARD Challenges: development and evaluation data from the second and third DIHARD evaluations, a set of shared tasks focusing on speech diarization for challenging data

• LORELEI: representative and incident language packs containing monolingual text, bi-text, translations, annotations, supplemental resources and related tools (Kinyarwanda, Wolof)

It’s not too late to join LDC for MY2020 (through December 31, 2021) and MY2021 (through December 31, 2022). Data sets from those years include 2018 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set, Mixer 4 and 5 Speech, AMR Annotation Release 3.0, Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English, RATS Speaker Identification, BOLT Egyptian Arabic and Chinese resources (treebanks, propbanks, co-reference), Global TIMIT Mandarin Chinese, and MyST Children’s Conversational Speech.

For full descriptions of all LDC data sets, browse our Catalog.  

Visit Join LDC for details on membership, user accounts and payment.

Spring 2022 Data Scholarship Application Deadline

Applications are now being accepted through January 15, 2022 for the Spring 2022 LDC Data Scholarship program which provides university students with no-cost access to LDC data. Consult the LDC Data Scholarship page for more information about program rules and submission requirements.

New publications:

(1) BOLT Egyptian Arabic PropBank and Sense – Discussion Forum, SMS/Chat, and Conversational Telephone Speech was developed by the University of Colorado Boulder - CLEAR (Computational Language and Education Research) for the DARPA BOLT program and consists of propbank annotation on Egyptian Arabic informal text and telephone speech. 

Propbank annotation provides a layer of semantic annotation over treebank. In this release, it was applied to BOLT phrase structure treebank annotation and was carried out in two phases: (1) a frame file for each predicate was created, and (2) the predicate argument structure was annotated using the frame file as a reference. 

BOLT Egyptian Arabic PropBank and Sense – Discussion Forum, SMS/Chat, and Conversational Telephone Speech is distributed via web download.  

2021 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2021 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 Development - Eleven Sources was developed by LDC and contains approximately 22 hours of English and Chinese speech data along with corresponding annotations used in support of the Second DIHARD Challenge.

The DIHARD Challenges are a set of shared tasks on diarization 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 with the first challenge, the second development and evaluation sets were drawn from a diverse sampling of sources including monologues, map task dialogues, broadcast interviews, sociolinguistic interviews, meeting speech, speech in restaurants, clinical recordings, extended child language acquisition recordings, and amateur web videos.

Second DIHARD Challenge Development – Eleven Sources is distributed via web download. 

2021 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2021 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) Second 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 Second DIHARD Challenge. The DIHARD Challenges are a set of shared tasks on diarization 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.

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.

The data in this release consists of files provided in the Second DIHARD Challenge as well as subsequently updated annotated files not provided to second challenge participants.

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

2021 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. 2021 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 November Newsletter

Join LDC for Membership Year 2019

Spring 2019 Data Scholarship Program

Commercial use and LDC data

New publications:

AISHELL-1

Avatar Education Portuguese

BOLT Egyptian Arabic Treebank - Discussion Forum

IARPA Babel Telugu Language Pack IARPA-babel303b-v1.0a

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Join LDC for Membership Year 2019

Membership Year 2019 (MY2019) is open and discounts are available for those who keep their membership current and join early in the year. Now through March 1, 2019, current MY2018 members who renew their LDC membership before March 1 will receive a 10% discount off the membership fee. New or returning organizations will receive a 5% discount through March 1. 

In addition to receiving new publications, current LDC members also enjoy the benefit of licensing older data at reduced costs from our Catalog of over 750 holdings. Current-year for-profit members may use most data for commercial applications. 

Plans for MY2019 publications are in progress. Among the expected releases are:

• SRI Speech-Based Collaborative Learning Corpus: speech from over 100 US middle school students performing collaborative learning tasks, includes audio recordings, orthographic transcriptions, manual annotation of collaboration, and related documentation

• Chinese Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR): developed by Nanjing Normal University and Brandeis University, semantic representation of approximately 10,000 Chinese sentences following the basic principles of AMR using web source data from Chinese Treebank 8.0 (LDC2013T21)

• Multilanguage conversational telephone speech: developed to support language identification research in related languages (Arabic, East Asian, English, Mandarin)

• TAC KBP: English entity discovery and linking, nugget detection and event argument data, Chinese slot-filling data

• CALLFRIEND Second Edition: updated releases with .wav format audio, simplified directory structure and enhanced documentation and metadata (English, Egyptian Arabic, Mandarin Chinese-Taiwan)

• HAVIC Med Progress Test data: English web video, metadata, and annotations for developing multimedia systems

• IARPA Babel Language Packs (telephone speech and transcripts): languages include Amharic, Guarani, Igbo, and Lithuanian

• BOLT: discussion forums, SMS, word-aligned and tagged data in all languages (Chinese, Egyptian Arabic, English)

And, it’s not too late to join for MY2017 (through December 31, 2018) and MY2018 (through December 31, 2019). Data sets from those years include 2010 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set, RATS Keyword Spotting and Language Identification releases, CHiME, Noisy TIMIT Speech, Concretely Annotated New York Times and English Gigaword, DIRHA English WSJ Audio, LORELEI Amharic and Somali Language Packs and DEFT Spanish Treebank. For full descriptions of all LDC data sets, browse our Catalog.  

Visit Join LDC for details on membership, user accounts and payment.

Spring 2019 Data Scholarship Program

Applications are now being accepted through January 15, 2019 for the Spring 2019 LDC Data Scholarship program which provides university students with no-cost access to LDC data. Consult the LDC Data Scholarship page for more information about program rules and submission requirements.

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 the Licensing page for further information. 

New publications:

(1) AISHELL-1 was developed by Beijing Shell Shell Technology Co., Ltd. It contains approximately 520 hours of Chinese Mandarin speech from 400 speakers recorded simultaneously on three different devices with associated transcripts.

The goal of the collection was to support speech recognition system development in 11 domains, including smart homes, autonomous driving, entertainment, finance and science and technology. Participants read 500 sentences covering the domains; sentences were chosen for their speech and phonetic characteristics. The speech was recorded in a quiet indoor environment on a high fidelity microphone and two mobile phones (Android and IOS). 

Speakers were recruited from different accent areas across China, including North, South and Yue-Gui-Min regions. There were 214 female speakers and 186 male speakers. Additional demographic information about the participants is included in this release.

AISHELL-1 is distributed via hard drive.

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) Avatar Education Portuguese was developed by the University of Pernambuco and consists of approximately 80 minutes of Brazilian Portuguese microphone speech with phonetic and orthographic transcriptions. The data was developed for Avatar Education, an animated virtual assistant designed to enhance communication and interaction in educational contexts, such as online learning.

The corpus contains 1,400 speakers (700 male, 700 female) who generated 1,400 utterances from read and spontaneous speech. Utterances were transcribed at the word level (without time alignments) and at the phoneme level (with time alignment labels).

Avatar Education Portuguese 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) BOLT Egyptian Arabic Treebank - Discussion Forum was developed by LDC and consists of Egyptian Arabic web discussion forum data with part-of-speech annotation, morphology, gloss and syntactic tree annotation collected for the DARPA Broad Operational Language Translation (BOLT) Program. 

The annotations in this release follow Penn Arabic Treebank (PATB) annotation guidelines. There are two kinds of morphological analysis synchronized in the corpus. LDC Standard Morphological Analyzer (SAMA) Version 3.1 (LDC2010L01) was used for Modern Standard Arabic tokens, and CALIMA(Columbia Arabic Language and dIalect Morphological Analyzer) was used for Egyptian-Arabic tokens.

This release contains 440,448 tokens before clitics were split and 508,548 tree tokens after clitics were split for treebank annotation. The source material is web discussion forums collected by LDC from various sources.

The unannotated Egyptian Arabic source data is released as BOLT Arabic Discussion Forums (LDC2018T10).

BOLT Egyptian Arabic Treebank - Discussion Forum 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 Telugu Language Pack IARPA-babel303b-v1.0a was developed by Appen for the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) Babel program. It contains approximately 201 hours of Telugu conversational and scripted telephone speech collected in 2013 and 2014 along with corresponding transcripts.

The Telugu speech in this release represents that spoken in the Central, East, South and North Telugu dialect regions of India.The gender distribution among speakers is approximately equal; speakers' ages range from 16 years to 65 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 Telugu Language Pack IARPA-babel303b-v1.0a 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 December 2016 Newsletter

Renew your LDC membership today
Spring 2017 LDC Data Scholarship Program - deadline approaching
LDC to close for Winter Break

New publications:

Bamanankan Lexicon

IARPA Babel Tagalog Language Pack IARPA-babel106-v0.2g

TAC KBP Spanish Cross-lingual Entity Linking - Comprehensive Training and Evaluation Data 2012-2014

GALE Phase 4 Arabic Newswire Parallel Sentences

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Renew your LDC membership today

Membership Year 2017 (MY2017) is open for joining and discounts are available for those who keep their membership current and join early in the year. Now through March 1, 2017, current MY2016 members who renew before March 1, will receive a 10% discount off of the membership fee. New or returning organizations will receive a 5% discount through March 1. 

In addition to receiving new publications, current year LDC members also enjoy the benefit of licensing older data at reduced costs from our Catalog of almost 700 holdings; current year for-profit members may use most data for commercial applications.

Plans for MY2017 publications are in progress. Among the expected releases are:

• 2010 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation data set
• Multilanguage conversational telephone speech: developed to support language identification research in related languages
• UCLA High Speed Laryngeal Database: audio recordings and high-speed video endoscopic images of the vocal folds while sustaining vowels
• Noisy TIMIT: TIMIT with added artificial noise
• CHiME shared task data: noisy read WSJ speech
• First Year Law Students’ Memoranda: memos to a hypothetical court with annotations
• IARPA Babel Language Packs: languages include Vietnamese, Haitian Creole, Zulu, Kazakh and Lithuanian
• BOLT: source, parallel and word-aligned data in all languages
• RATS Keyword Spotting data set
• GALE Phases 3 and 4: all tasks and languages    

And don’t forget, MY2016 and MY2015 are still open for joining. MY2015 can be joined through December 31, 2016 and includes data such as RATS Speech Activity Detection and updates to Penn Treebank. MY 2016 will remain open through December 31, 2017 and includes data such as BOLT Chinese Discussion Forums, IARPA Babel Language Packs and Multi-Language Conversational Telephone Speech – Slavic Group. For full descriptions of these data sets, visit our Catalog.  

Visit Join LDC for details on membership, user accounts and payment.

Spring 2017 LDC Data Scholarship Program - deadline approaching

Students can apply for the Spring 2017 Data Scholarship Program now through January 16, 2017, 11:59PM EST. The LDC Data Scholarship program provides undergraduate and graduate students with access to LDC data at no cost.

For more information on application requirements and program rules, please visit LDC Data Scholarships. Students can email their applications to the LDC Data Scholarships program. Decisions will be sent by email from the same address.

LDC to close for Winter Break

LDC will be closed from Monday, December 26, 2016 through Monday, January 2, 2017 in accordance with the University of Pennsylvania Winter Break Policy. Our offices will reopen on Tuesday, January 3, 2017. Requests received for membership renewals and corpora during the Winter Break will not be processed until the week of January 3.

New Corpora

(1) Bamanankan Lexicon was developed by LDC and contains 5,978 entries of the Bamanankan language presented as a Bamanankan-English lexicon and a Bamanankan-French lexicon. It is the third publication in an LDC project to build an electronic dictionary of three Mandekan languages: Mawukakan, Maninkakan and Bamanankan. These are Eastern Manding languages in the Mande Group of the Niger-Congo language family. LDC released a Mawukakan Lexicon (LDC2005L01) in 2005 and a Maninkakan Lexicon (LDC2013L01) in 2013.

This lexicon is presented using a Latin-based transcription system because the Latin alphabet is familiar to the majority of Mandekan language speakers and it is expected to facilitate the work of researchers interested in this resource.

Bamanankan Lexicon is distributed via web download.

2016 Subscription Members will receive 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) IARPA Babel Tagalog Language Pack IARPA-babel106-v0.2g was developed by Appen for the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) Babel program. It contains approximately 213 hours of Tagalog 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 Tagalog speech in this release represents that spoken in the North, Central and South dialect regions in the Philippines. The gender distribution among speakers is approximately equal; speakers' ages range from 16 years to 65 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 Tagalog Language Pack IARPA-babel106-v0.2g is distributed via web download.

2016 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. 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) TAC KBP Spanish Cross-lingual Entity Linking - Comprehensive Training and Evaluation Data 2012-2014 was developed by LDC and contains training and evaluation data produced in support of the TAC KBP Spanish Cross-lingual Entity Linking tasks in 2012, 2013 and 2014. It includes queries and gold standard entity type information, Knowledge Base links, and equivalence class clusters for NIL entities along with the source documents for the queries, specifically, English and Spanish newswire, discussion forum and web data. The corresponding knowledge base is available as TAC KBP Reference Knowledge Base (LDC2014T16).

More information about the TAC KBP Entity Linking task and other TAC KBP evaluations can be found on the NIST TAC website.

TAC KBP Spanish Cross-lingual Entity Linking - Comprehensive Training and Evaluation Data 2012-2014 is distributed via web download.

2016 Subscription Members will receive 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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(4) GALE Phase 4 Arabic Newswire Parallel Sentences was developed by LDC and contains Modern Standard Arabic source text and corresponding English translations selected from newswire data collected by LDC in 2008 and translated by LDC or under its direction.

This release includes 393 source-translation document pairs drawn from six distinct newswire sources, comprising 62,669 tokens of Arabic source text and its English translation. Source data and translations are distributed in TDF format. All data is encoded in UTF-8.

GALE Phase 4 Arabic Newswire Parallel sentences is distributed via web download.

2016 Subscription Members will receive 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 2016 February Newsletter

­­­­­­­­­­­­­Only two weeks left to enjoy 2016 membership savings

Spring 2016 LDC Data Scholarship recipients

How to Share Data through LDC webinar on YouTube

New publications:

BOLT Chinese Discussion Forums

GALE Phase 3 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Speech Part 2

GALE Phase 3 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Transcripts Part 2

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Only two weeks left to enjoy 2016 membership savings

There’s still time to save on 2016 membership fees. Now through March 1, all organizations receive a 5% discount when they join for MY2016. MY2015 members are eligible for an additional 5% off the fee (10% total savings) when they renew before March 1.  

To join, create or sign into your LDC user account, select your preferred membership type from the Catalog, add the item to your bin and follow the check-out process. The Membership Office will apply any discounts. Alternatively, if you have already received a renewal invoice from LDC, you can simply pay against that.

For more information on the benefits of membership, visit Join LDC.

Spring 2016 LDC Data Scholarship recipients
Congratulations to the recipients of LDC's Spring 2016 data scholarships:

Shefali Waldekar: Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (India), PhD Candidate, Electronics and Electrical Communications Engineering. Shefali is awarded copies of 2002 Rich Transcription Broadcast News and Conversational Telephone Speech and 2005 Spring NIST Rich Transcription (RT05-S) Evaluation Set for her research in audio diarization.

Nikola Invanov Nikolov: University of Zurich and ETH Zurich (Switzerland), MSc candidate in Informatics. Nikola is awarded a copy of Annotated English Gigaword for his research in text summarization.

Om Prakash Singh: Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati (India), Research scholar in spoken language identification. Om is awarded a copy of NIST Language Recognition Evaluation Test Set for his work in language identification.

Moshen Mohammadi: Iranian Research Institute for Electrical Engineering (Iran), PhD Candidate in Communications. Moshen is awarded copies of the 2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Sets 1 and 2, the Evaluation Test Set and the Supplemental Set for his work in speaker recognition in noisy environments.

For program information visit the Data Scholarship page.

How to Share Data through LDC webinar on YouTube

LDC’s first webinar, How to Share Data through LDC, is now available for viewing on our YouTube page. Presented live on January 22, 2016, the webinar outlined in easy steps the process for submitting language resources to LDC for publication in the Catalog. In addition, discussion topics included the benefits of sharing data through LDC, the corpus life cycle, data delivery, quality control and more.

New Corpora

(1) BOLT Chinese Discussion Forums was developed by LDC and consists of 1,597,500 discussion forum threads in Chinese harvested from the Internet using a combination of manual and automatic processes.

The DARPA 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 material in this release represents the Chinese source data in the discussion forum genre.

Collection was seeded based on the results of manual data scouting by native speaker annotators. When multiple threads from a forum were submitted, the entire forum was automatically harvested and added to the collection. The scale of the collection precluded manual review of all data. Only a small portion of the threads included in this release were manually reviewed, and it is expected that there may be some offensive or otherwise undesired content as well as some threads that contain a large amount of non-Chinese content. Language identification was performed on all threads in this corpus (using CLD2), and threads for which the results indicated a high probability of largely non-Chinese content are identified in this release.

BOLT Chinese Discussion Forums is distributed via web download as a multi-part zip file. Consult the Using LDC Data page (https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/data-management/using) for more information about this format.

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 3 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Speech Part 2 was developed by LDC and is comprised of approximately 129 hours of Arabic broadcast conversation speech collected in 2007 and 2008 by LDC, MediaNet, Tunis, Tunisia and MTC, Rabat, Morocco during Phase 3 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) program.

Corresponding transcripts are released as GALE Phase 3 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Transcripts Part 2 (LDC2016T06).

These broadcast conversation recordings feature interviews, call-in programs and roundtable discussions focusing principally on current events and are contained in 142 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 Arabic speaker following Audit Procedure Specification Version 2.0 which is included in this release.

GALE Phase 3 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Speech Part 2 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) GALE Phase 3 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Transcripts Part 2 was developed by LDC and contains transcriptions of approximately 129 hours of Arabic broadcast conversation speech collected in 2007 and 2008 by LDC, MediaNet, Tunis, Tunisia and MTC, Rabat, Morocco during Phase 3 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) program.

Corresponding audio data is released as GALE Phase 3 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Speech Part 2 (LDC2016S01).

The transcript files are in plain-text, tab-delimited format (TDF) with UTF-8 encoding, and the transcribed data totals 845,791 tokens. The transcripts were created with the LDC tool, XTrans, which 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.

GALE Phase 3 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Transcripts Part 2 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.