LDC November 2016 Newsletter

In this newsletter:

Join LDC for Membership Year 2017

Commercial use and LDC data

Spring 2017 Data Scholarship Program

LDC closed November 24-25 for US Thanksgiving Holiday

New publications:

JANA: A Human-Human Dialogues Corpus for Egyptian Dialect

Multi-Language Conversational Telephone Speech 2011 – Slavic Group

IARPA Babel Georgian Language Pack IARPA-babel404b-v1.0a

GALE Phase 3 and 4 Chinese Newswire Parallel Text

Join LDC for Membership Year 2017

Organizations engaged in language-related research, education and technology development are invited to join LDC for Membership Year (MY) 2017. Consortium members enjoy unparalleled access and continuing rights to new data releases and to an archive of close to 700 holdings.

Membership fees have not increased for 2017. In addition, discounts are available for organizations who keep their membership current and for those who join before March 1, 2017.

           • MY 2016 members receive a 10% discount if they renew their membership before March 1, 2017. After March 1, MY2016 members receive a 5% discount if they renew their membership any time in 2017.

           • New members and returning former members receive a 5% discount off the membership fee if they join/renew before March 1, 2017.

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 videoendoscopic 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   

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

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. 

Spring 2017 Data Scholarship Program

Applications are now being accepted through January 15, 2017 for the Spring 2017 LDC Data Scholarship program which provides university students with no-cost access to LDC data. Consult the LDC Data Scholarship page for further information about program rules and submission requirements.

LDC closed November 24-25 for US Thanksgiving Holiday

LDC will be closed on Thursday, November 24, 2016 and Friday, November 25, 2016 in observance of the US Thanksgiving Holiday. The office will reopen on Monday, November 28, 2016.

New Corpora

(1) JANA: A Human-Human Dialogues Corpus for Egyptian Dialect was developed by researchers at Cairo University. This is a special release in addition to the LDC scheduled corpora for membership year 2016, available under separate terms.

This corpus consists of 82 transcribed dialogues from call center inquiries annotated for dialogue acts. Data was collected from call centers for banks, airlines and mobile network providers in the form of spontaneous spoken telephone dialogues (52) and instant messaging dialogues (30) amounting to over 20,000 words.

Not-for-profit organizations may license this data set for a fee under the LDC Not-for-Profit Membership Agreement or under the LDC User Agreement for Non-Members for use in linguistic research, education and non-commercial technology development. For-profit organizations may license this data for a fee under a commercial license.

(2) Multi-Language Conversational Telephone Speech 2011 – Slavic Group was developed by LDC and is comprised of approximately 60 hours of telephone speech in Polish, Russian and Ukrainian. The data was collected to support research and technology evaluation in automatic language identification, specifically language pair discrimination for closely related languages/dialects.

Call were made using LDC’s telephone collection infrastructure. Human auditors labeled calls for gender, dialect type and noise.  Audio data is presented in FLAC-compressed MS-WAV (RIFF) file format. Each uncompressed file is two channels, recorded at 8000 samples/second with samples stored as 16-bit signed integers.

Multi-Language Conversational Telephone Speech 2011 – Slavic Group 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.

(3) IARPA Babel Georgian Language Pack IARPA-babel404b-v1.0a was developed by Appen for the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) Babel program. It contains approximately 190 hours of Georgian conversational and scripted telephone speech collected in 2014-2015 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 Georgian speech in this release represents that spoken in the Eastern and Western dialect regions in Georgia. The gender distribution among speakers is approximately equal; speakers' ages range from 16 years to 73 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 Georgian Language Pack IARPA-babel404b-v1.0a 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.

(4) GALE Phase 3 and 4 Chinese Newswire Parallel Text was developed by LDC and contains Chinese source text and corresponding English translations selected from newswire data collected by LDC in 2007-2008 and translated by LDC or under its direction.

This release includes 367 source-translation document pairs drawn from five distinct newswire sources, comprising 210,048 tokens of Chinese source text and its English translation. Source data and translations are distributed in TDF format. All data is encoded in UTF-8.

GALE Phase 3 and 4 Chinese Newswire Parallel Text 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 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 November Newsletter

Invitation to Join for Membership Year (MY) 2016

Commercial use and LDC data

Spring 2016 Data Scholarship Program

LDC closed for Thanksgiving Break

New publications:

Articulation Index LSCP
GALE Phase 4 Chinese Newswire Parallel Sentences

KHATT: Handwritten Arabic Text

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Invitation to Join for Membership Year (MY) 2016

Membership Year (MY) 2016 is open for joining.  We would like to invite all current and previous members of LDC to renew their membership as well as welcome new organizations to join the Consortium.  For MY2016, LDC is pleased to maintain membership fees at last year’s rates – membership fees will not increase.  Additionally, LDC will extend discounts on membership fees to members who keep their membership current and who join early in the year.

The details of our early renewal discounts for MY2015 are as follows: 

• Organizations who joined for MY2015 will receive a 10% discount when renewing before March 1, 2016. After March 1, 2016, MY2015 members are eligible for a 5% discount when renewing through the end of the year.
• New members as well as organizations who did not join for MY2015, but who held membership in any of the previous MYs (1993-2014), will also be eligible for a 5% discount provided that they join/renew before March 1, 2016.

Publications for MY2016 are still being planned but we plan to release the following:

• Arabic Treebank - Weblog ~ part-of-speech/morphological annotation and syntactic tree annotation of web text from various sources
• BOLT ~ all phases, languages, genres, tasks
• DEFT ~ Spanish and Chinese resources
• Digital Archive of Southern Speech - NLP Version ~ colloquial speech in the Southern United States; NLP version normalizes filenames and formats
• GALE Phase 3 and 4 data ~ all tasks and languages    
• HAVIC ~ amateur video and transcripts
• NewSoMe Corpus of Opinion in Blogs ~ opinion annotated English and Spanish blogs

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 our Licensing page for further information.

Spring 2016 Data Scholarship Program

Applications are now being accepted through Friday, January 15, 2016 for the Spring 2016 LDC Data Scholarship program. The LDC Data Scholarship program provides university students with access to LDC data at no-cost.  This program is open to students pursuing both undergraduate and graduate studies in an accredited college or university. LDC Data Scholarships are not restricted to any particular field of study; however, students must demonstrate a well-developed research agenda and a bona fide inability to pay.

The application consists of two parts:

(1) Data Use Proposal. Applicants must submit a proposal describing their intended use of the data. The proposal should state which data the student plans to use and how the data will benefit their research project as well as information on the proposed methodology or algorithm.

(2) Letter of Support. Applicants must submit one letter of support from their thesis adviser or department chair. The letter must verify the student's need for data and confirm that the department or university lacks the funding to pay the full nonmember fee for the data or to join the Consortium.

For further information on application materials and program rules, please visit the LDC Data Scholarship page.

Students can email their applications to the LDC Data Scholarship program. Decisions will be sent by email from the same address.

The deadline for the Spring 2016 program cycle is January 15, 2016.

LDC closed for Thanksgiving Break
LDC will be closed on Thursday, November 26, 2015 and Friday, November 27, 2015 in observance of the US Thanksgiving Holiday.  Our offices will reopen on Monday, November 30, 2015.

New publications
(1) Articulation Index LSCP was developed by researchers at Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (LSCP), Ecole Normale Supérieure. It revises and enhances a subset of Articulation Index (AIC) (LDC2005S22), a corpus of persons speaking English syllables. Changes include the addition of forced alignment to sound files, time alignment of syllable utterances and format conversions. AIC consists of 20 American English speakers (12 males, 8 females) pronouncing syllables, some of which form actual words, but most of which are nonsense syllables. All possible Consonant-Vowel (CV) and Vowel-Consonant (VC) combinations were recorded for each speaker twice, once in isolation and once within a carrier-sentence, for a total of 25768 recorded syllables.

Articulation Index LSCP alters AIC in the following ways.

1. Time-alignments for the onset and offset of each word and syllable were generated through forced-alignment with a standard HMM-GMM (Hidden Markov Model-Gaussian Mixture Model) ASR system.
2. The time-alignments for the beginning and end of the syllables (whether in isolation or within a carrier sentence) were manually adjusted. The time-alignments for the other words in carrier sentences were not manually adjusted
3. The recordings of isolated syllables were cut according to the manual time-alignments to remove the silent portions at the beginning and end, and the time-alignments were altered to correspond to the cut recordings
4. The file naming scheme was slightly altered for compatibility with the Kaldi speech recognition toolkit.de
5. AIC contains a wide-band (16 KHz, 16-bit PCM) and a narrow-band (8 KHz, 8 bit u-law) version of the recordings distributed in sphere format. The LSCP version contains the wide-band version only distributed as wave files.

Articulation Index LSCP 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.  This data is being made available at no-cost for non-member organizations under a research license.

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(2) GALE Phase 4 Chinese Newswire 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 newswire data collected by LDC in 2008 and translated by LDC or under its direction.

GALE Phase 4 Chinese Newswire Parallel Sentences includes 627 source-translation document pairs, comprising 90,434 tokens of Chinese source text and its English translation. Data is drawn from six distinct Chinese newswire sources.

Sentences were selected for translation in two steps. First, files were chosen using sentence selection scripts.  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.

GALE Phase 4 Chinese Newswire 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) KHATT: Handwritten Arabic Text was developed by King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals, Technical University of Dortmund and Braunschweig University of Technology. It is comprised of scanned Arabic handwriting from 1,000 distinct male and female writers representing diverse countries, age groups, handedness and education levels. Participants produced text on a topic of their choice in an unrestricted style. KHATT was designed to promote research in areas such as text recognition and writer identification.

The majority of participants were natives of Saudi Arabia; the next largest group was from a collection of regional countries (Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia and Yemen). Most writers were between 16-25 years of age with high school or university qualifications.

KHATT: Handwritten Arabic Text is distributed on one USB drive.

2015 Subscription Members will automatically receive a copy 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.

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.

LDC 2015 September Newsletter

New Publications

GALE Chinese-English Word Alignment and Tagging -- Broadcast Training Part 4

GALE Phase 3 and 4 Arabic Newswire Parallel Text

NewSoMe Corpus of Opinion in News Report

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New Publications

(1) GALE Chinese-English Word Alignment and Tagging -- Broadcast Training Part 4 was developed by LDC and contains 243,038 tokens of word aligned Chinese and English parallel text enriched with linguistic tags. This material was used as training data in the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) program.

Some approaches to statistical machine translation include the incorporation of linguistic knowledge in word aligned text as a means to improve automatic word alignment and machine translation quality. 

This is accomplished with two annotation schemes: alignment and tagging. Alignment identifies minimum translation units and translation relations by using minimum-match and attachment annotation approaches. A set of word tags and alignment link tags are designed in the tagging scheme to describe these translation units and relations. Tagging adds contextual, syntactic and language-specific features to the alignment annotation.

This release consists of Chinese source broadcast conversation (BC) and broadcast news (BN) programming collected by LDC in 2008 and 2009. The distribution by genre, words, character tokens and segments appears below:

Language	Genre	Files	Words	CharTokens	Segments
Chinese	BC	69	67,782	101,674	2,276
Chinese	BN	29	94,242	141,364	3,152
Total		98	162,024	243,038	5,428

Note that all token counts are based on the Chinese data only. One token is equivalent to one character and one word is equivalent to 1.5 characters.

The Chinese word alignment tasks consisted of the following components:

• Identifying, aligning, and tagging eight different types of links
• Identifying, attaching, and tagging local-level unmatched words
• Identifying and tagging sentence/discourse-level unmatched words
• Identifying and tagging all instances of Chinese 的 (DE) except when they were a part of a semantic link

GALE Chinese-English Word Alignment and Tagging -- Broadcast Training Part 4 is distributed via web download.

2015 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus on disc.  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) GALE Phase 3 and 4 Arabic Newswire Parallel Text was developed by LDC. Along with other corpora, the parallel text in this release comprised training data for Phases 3 and 4 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) Program. This corpus contains Modern Standard Arabic source text and corresponding English translations selected from newswire data collected by LDC in 2007 and 2008 and transcribed and translated by LDC or under its direction.

This data includes 551 source-translation document pairs, comprising 156,775 tokens of Arabic source text and its English translation. Data is drawn from seven distinct Arabic newswire sources: Agence France Presse, Al Ahram, Al Hayat, Al-Quds Al-Arabi, An Nahar, Asharq Al-Awsat and Assabah.

The files in this release were transcribed by LDC staff and/or transcription vendors under contract to LDC in accordance with the Quick Rich Transcription guidelines developed by LDC. The transcribed and segmented files were reformatted into a human-readable translation format and assigned to translation vendors. Translators followed LDC's Arabic to English translation guidelines. Bilingual LDC staff performed quality control procedures on the completed translations.  Source data and translations are distributed in TDF format.

GALE Phase 3 and 4 Arabic Newswire Parallel Text is distributed via web download.

2015 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus on disc.  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) NewSoMe Corpus of Opinion in News Reports was compiled at Barcelona Media and consists of Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese news reports annotated for opinions. It is part of the NewSoMe (News and Social Media) set of corpora presenting opinion annotations across several genres and covering multiple languages. NewSoMe is the result of an effort to build a unifying annotation framework for analyzing opinion in different genres, ranging from controlled text, such as news reports, to diverse types of user-generated content that includes blogs, product reviews and microblogs.

The source data in this release was obtained from various newspaper websites and consists of approximately 200 documents in each of Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese. The annotation was carried out manually through the crowdsourcing platform CrowdFlower with seven annotations per layer that were aggregated for this data set. The layers annotated were topic, segment, cue, subjectivity, polarity and intensity.

NewSoMe Corpus of Opinion in News Reports is distributed via web download.

2015 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus on disc.  2015 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for a fee.