Showing posts with label transcripts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label transcripts. Show all posts

Friday, March 15, 2019

LDC 2019 March Newsletter

Call for Papers - LTC 2019, LREC 2020

New Publications:
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Call for Papers

The 9th Language & Technology Conference (LTC 2019) will take place on May 17-19, 2019 at the Adam Mickiewicz University in PoznaƄ, Poland. LTC addresses Human Language Technologies as a challenge for computer science, linguistics and related fields. Conference papers are due next week on Wednesday, March 20, 2019 (midnight, any time zone). For more information, visit the conference webpage

The 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020) will take place on May 13-15, 2020 at the Palais du Pharo in Marseille, France. LREC aims to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art, explore new R&D directions and emerging trends, and exchange information regarding language resources and their applications, evaluation methodologies and tools. Conference papers are due by November 25, 2019. For more information, including conference topics, visit the conference webpage.

New Publications:

(1) CALLFRIEND Egyptian Arabic Second Edition was developed by LDC and consists of approximately 25 hours of unscripted telephone conversations between native speakers of Egyptian Arabic. This second edition updates the audio files to wav format, simplifies the directory structure and adds documentation and metadata. The first edition is available as CALLFRIEND Egyptian Arabic (LDC96S49).

All data was collected before July 1997. Participants could speak with a person of their choice on any topic; most called family members and friends. All calls originated in North America. The recorded conversations last up to 30 minutes. 

CALLFRIEND Egyptian Arabic Second Edition 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) Penn Discourse Treebank Version 3.0 is the third release in the Penn Discourse Treebank project, the goal of which is to annotate the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) section of Treebank-2 (LDC95T7) with discourse relations. Penn Discourse Treebank Version 2 (LDC2008T05) contains over 40,600 tokens of annotated relations. In Version 3, an additional 13,000 tokens were annotated, certain pairwise annotations were standardized, new senses were included and the corpus was subject to a series of consistency checks.

This corpus contains two tools: (1) The Annotator, used for annotation and adjudication, and which can also be used for viewing the corpus; and (2) The Conversion Tool for converting Version 2 annotation files into the Version 3 format.

The documentation directory contains a manual describing what is new in Version 3 and how Version 3 differs from Version 2; the methods and guidelines used in annotating PDTB Version 3; and a range of statistics on the tokens, including the frequency of each connective, its sense labels and its modifiers. More information about the corpus and research carried out by the developers and others using the corpus can be found on the PDTB website.

Penn Discourse Treebank Version 3.0 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) VAST Chinese Speech and Transcripts was developed by LDC for the VAST (Video Annotation for Speech Technologies) project and is comprised of approximately 29 hours of Mandarin Chinese audio extracted from amateur video content harvested from the web and corresponding time-aligned transcripts. 

Audio files were transcribed using XTrans, which supports manual transcription across multiple channels, languages and platforms. Transcribers followed a Quick-Rich Transcription style; transcription guidelines are included in this release. 

The aim of the VAST project was to collect and annotate data in several languages to support the development of speech technologies such as speech activity detection, language identification, speaker identification, and speech recognition. 

VAST Chinese Speech and Transcripts 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. 

Monday, February 15, 2016

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:
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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.


Wednesday, December 16, 2015

LDC 2015 December Newsletter

Renew your LDC membership today

Spring 2016 LDC Data Scholarship Program - deadline approaching

LDC at LSA 2016

LDC to close for Winter Break

New publications
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Renew your LDC membership today
Membership Year 2016 (MY2016) discounts are available for those who keep their membership current and join early in the year. Check here for further information including our planned publications for MY2016.

Now is also a good time to consider joining LDC for the current and open membership years, MY2015 and MY2014.  MY2015 includes data such as RATS Speech Activity Detection and updates to Penn Treebank. MY2014 remains open through the end of the 2015 calendar year and its publications include UN speech data, 2009 NIST LRE test set, 2007 ACE multilingual data, and multi-channel WSJ audio. For full descriptions of these data sets, visit our Catalog.

Spring 2016 LDC Data Scholarship Program - deadline approaching
The deadline for the Spring 2016 LDC Data Scholarship Program is right around the corner! Student applications are being accepted now through January 15, 2016, 11:59PM EST. 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.

Students will need to complete an application which consists of a data use proposal and letter of support from their adviser. 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 Scholarships program. Decisions will be sent by email from the same address.

LDC at LSA 2016
LDC will be exhibiting at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, held January 7-10, 2016 in Washington, DC. Stop by booth 110 to learn more about recent developments at the Consortium and new publications. Also, be on the lookout for the following presentations:

Satellite Workshop: Preparing Your Corpus for Archival Storage
Malcah Yaeger-Dror (University of Arizona) and Christopher Cieri (LDC)
Thursday, January 7, 2016 - 8:00am to 3:00pm, Salon 4

Broadening connections among researchers in linguistics and human language technologies
Jeff Good (University at Buffalo) and Christopher Cieri (LDC)
Friday, January 8, 2016 - 7:30am to 9:00am, Salon 1

Diachronic development of pitch contrast in Seoul Korean
Sunghye Cho (UPenn), Yong-cheol Lee (Cheongju University) and Mark Liberman (LDC)
Friday, January 8, 2016 - 2:00pm to 5:00pm, Salon 1

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

LDC to close for Winter Break
LDC will be closed from Friday, December 25, 2015 through Friday, January 1, 2016 in accordance with the University of Pennsylvania Winter Break Policy. Our offices will reopen on Monday, January 4, 2016. Requests received for membership renewals and corpora during the Winter Break will be processed at that time.

New publications
(1) 2006 CoNLL Shared Task - Arabic & Czech consists of Arabic and Czech dependency treebanks used as part of the CoNLL 2006 shared task on multi-lingual dependency parsing.

This corpus is cross listed with ELRA as ELRA-W0087.

The Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL) is accompanied every year by a shared task intended to promote natural language processing applications and evaluate them in a standard setting. In 2006, the shared task was devoted to the parsing of syntactic dependencies using corpora from up to thirteen languages. The task aimed to define and extend the then-current state of the art in dependency parsing, a technology that complemented previous tasks by producing a different kind of syntactic description of input text. More information about the 2006 shared task is available on the CoNLL-X web page.

This source data in this release consists principally of news and journal texts. The individual data sets are subsets of the following:
2006 CoNLL Shared Task - Arabic & Czech 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) 2006 CoNLL Shared Task - Ten Languages consists of dependency treebanks in ten languages used as part of the CoNLL 2006 shared task on multi-lingual dependency parsing. The languages covered in this release are: Bulgarian, Danish, Dutch, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

This corpus is cross listed and jointly released with ELRA as ELRA-W0086.

The Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL) is accompanied every year by a shared task intended to promote natural language processing applications and evaluate them in a standard setting. In 2006 , the shared task was devoted to the parsing of syntactic dependencies using corpora from up to thirteen languages. The task aimed to define and extend the then-current state of the art in dependency parsing, a technology that complemented previous tasks by producing a different kind of syntactic description of input text. More information about the 2006 shared task is available on the CoNLL-X web page.

The source data in the treebanks in this release consists principally of various texts (e.g., textbooks, news, literature) annotated in dependency format. In general, dependency grammar is based on the idea that the verb is the center of the clause structure and that other units in the sentence are connected to the verb as directed links or dependencies. 
The individual data sets are:
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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(3) GALE Phase 3 Chinese Broadcast News Speech was developed by LDC and is comprised of approximately 150 hours of Mandarin Chinese broadcast news speech collected in 2007 and 2008 by LDC and Hong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong, during Phase 3 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) Program.

Corresponding transcripts are released as GALE Phase 3 Chinese Broadcast News Transcripts (LDC2015T25).

The broadcast news recordings in this release feature news broadcasts focusing principally on current events from the following sources: Anhui TV, China Central TV (CCTV), Phoenix TV and Voice of America (VOA).

This release contains 279 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 Chinese speaker following Audit Procedure Specification Version 2.0 which is included in this release.

GALE Phase 3 Chinese Broadcast News Speech 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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(4) GALE Phase 3 Chinese Broadcast News Transcripts was developed by LDC and contains transcriptions of approximately 150 hours of Chinese broadcast news speech collected in 2007 and 2008 by LDC and Hong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong, during Phase 3 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) Program.

Corresponding audio data is released as GALE Phase 3 Chinese Broadcast News Speech (LDC2015S13).

The broadcast news recordings for transcription feature news broadcasts focusing principally on current events from the following sources: Anhui TV,  China Central TV (CCTV), Phoenix TV and Voice of America (VOA).

The transcript files are in plain-text, tab-delimited format (TDF) with UTF-8 encoding, and the transcribed data totals 1,933,695 tokens. The transcripts were created with the LDC-developed transcription tool, XTrans, a multi-platform, multilingual, multi-channel transcription tool that 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 Chinese Broadcast News Transcripts 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.


Friday, August 15, 2014

LDC 2014 August Newsletter


Fall 2014 LDC Data Scholarship program- September 15 deadline approaching
Neural Engineering Data Consortium publishes first release

New publications:



Fall 2014 LDC Data Scholarship program- September 15 deadline approaching!
Student applications for the Fall 2014 LDC Data Scholarship program are being accepted now through Monday, September 15, 2014, 11:59PM EST.  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.  

Students will need to complete an application which consists of a data use proposal and letter of support from their adviser.  For further information on application materials and program rules, please visit the LDCData Scholarship page.  

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

Neural Engineering Data Consortium publishes first release
The Neural Engineering Data Consortium (NEDC) has announced its first release, the Temple University Hospital Electroencephalogram (TUH EEG) corpus. TUH EEG corpus is a database of over 20,000 EEG recordings which will aid the development of technology to automatically interpret EEG scans. NEDC, directed by Professors Iyad Obeid and Joe Picone of Temple University, Philadelphia, PA USA , designs, collects and distributes data and resources in support of neural engineering research

NEDC is surveying community needs to help set priorities for future effort. You can complete the survey here.

New publications
(1) GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast News Speech Part 1 was developed by LDC and is comprised of approximately 165 hours of Arabic broadcast news speech collected in 2006 and 2007 by LDC, MediaNet, Tunis, Tunisia and MTC, Rabat, Morocco during Phase 2 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) Program. Corresponding transcripts are released as GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast News Transcripts Part 1 (LDC2014T17).

Broadcast audio for the GALE program was collected at LDC’s Philadelphia, PA USA facilities and at three remote collection sites: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong King (Chinese), Medianet (Tunis, Tunisia) (Arabic), and MTC (Rabat, Morocco) (Arabic). The combined local and outsourced broadcast collection supported GALE at a rate of approximately 300 hours per week of programming from more than 50 broadcast sources for a total of over 30,000 hours of collected broadcast audio over the life of the program.

The broadcast recordings in this release feature news programs focusing principally on current events from the following sources: Abu Dhabi TV, a televisions station based in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; Al Alam News Channel, based in Iran; Alhurra, a U.S. government-funded regional broadcaster; Aljazeera, a regional broadcaster located in Doha, Qatar; Dubai TV, a broadcast station in the United Arab Emirates; Al Iraqiyah, an Iraqi television station; Kuwait TV, a national broadcast station in Kuwait; Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation, a Lebanese television station; Nile TV, a broadcast programmer based in Egypt; Saudi TV, a national television station based in Saudi Arabia; and Syria TV, the national television station in Syria.

This release contains 200 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. The broadcast auditing process served three principal goals: as a check on the operation of the broadcast collection system equipment by identifying failed, incomplete or faulty recordings; as an indicator of broadcast schedule changes by identifying instances when the incorrect program was recorded; and as a guide for data selection by retaining information about a program’s genre, data type and topic.

GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast News Speech Part 1 is distributed on three DVD-ROM.

2014 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this data.  2014 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 2 Arabic Broadcast News Transcripts Part 1 was developed by LDC and contains transcriptions of approximately 165 hours of Arabic broadcast news speech collected in 2006 and 2007 by LDC, MediaNet, Tunis, Tunisia and MTC, Rabat, Morocco during Phase 2 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) program. Corresponding audio data is released as GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast News Speech Part 1 (LDC2014S07).

The transcript files are in plain-text, tab-delimited format (TDF) with UTF-8 encoding, and the transcribed data totals 897,868 tokens. The transcripts were created with the LDC-developed transcription tool, XTrans, a multi-platform, multilingual, multi-channel transcription tool that 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. QTR transcription consists of quick (near-)verbatim, time-aligned transcripts plus speaker identification with minimal additional mark-up. It does not include sentence unit annotation. QRTR annotation adds structural information such as topic boundaries and manual sentence unit annotation to the core components of a quick transcript. Files with QTR as part of the filename were developed using QTR transcription. Files with QRTR in the filename indicate QRTR transcription.

GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast News Transcripts Part 1 is distributed via web download.

2014 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this data on disc.  2014 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 Reference Knowledge Base was developed by LDC in support of the NIST-sponsored TAC-KBP evaluation series. It is a knowledge base built from English Wikipedia articles and their associated infoboxes and covers over 800,000 entities.

TAC (Text Analysis Conference) is a series of workshops organized by NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) to encourage research in natural language processing and related applications by providing a large test collection, common evaluation procedures, and a forum for researchers to share their results. TAC's KBP track (Knowledge Base Population) 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.

Consult the LDC TAC-KBP project page for further information about LDC's resource development for the TAC-KBP program.

The source data, Wikipedia infoboxes and articles, was taken from an October 2008 snapshot of Wikipedia.

TAC KBP Reference Knowledge Base contains a set of entities, each with a canonical name and title for the Wikipedia page, an entity type, an automatically parsed version of the data from the infobox in the entity's Wikipedia article, and a stripped version of the text of the Wiki article. Each entity is assigned one of four types: PER (person), ORG (organization), GPE (geo-political entity) and UKN (unknown). All data files are presented as UTF-8 encoded XML.

TAC KBP Reference Knowledge Base is distributed on one DVD-ROM.


2014 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this data.  2014 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for a fee.