<![CDATA[☆☆ 卢伟个人主页 _____ ☆☆☆☆☆ _____ Lu Wei's Homepage ☆☆]]>http://www.luweixmu.com/home/PJBlog32011-11-17T10:03:21+08:00<![CDATA[New Publications of Linguistic Data Consortium]]>adminhttp://www.luweixmu.com/home/luwig@xmu.edu.cn2011-11-17T10:03:21+08:002011-11-17T10:03:21+08:00LDC2011S09 2006 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Set LDC2011V06 2006 NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program - Meeting Data Test Set Part 2 LDC2011T13 Chinese Gigaword Fifth Edition -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Spring 2012 LDC Data Scholarship Program
Applications are now being accepted through January 15, 2012 for the Spring 2012 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 selection process is highly competitive. The application consists of two parts: (1) Data Use Proposal. Applicants must submit a proposal describing their intended use of the data. The proposal must contain the applicant's name, university, and field of study. The proposal should state which data the student plans to use and contain a description of their research project. Applicants should consult the LDC Corpus Catalog for a complete list of data distributed by LDC. Due to certain restrictions, a handful of LDC corpora are restricted to members of the Consortium. Applicants are advised to select a maximum of one to two data sets; students may apply for additional data sets during the following cycle once they have completed processing of the initial data sets and publish or present work in some juried venue. (2) Letter of Support. Applicants must submit one letter of support from their thesis adviser or department chair. The letter must confirm that the department or university lacks the funding to pay the full Non-member Fee for the data and verify the student's need for data. 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 2012 program cycle is January 15, 2012.
Publications for MY2012 are still being planned; here are the working titles of data sets we intend to provide: · ARRAU 1.2 (Anaphor Resolution and Underspecification) · TORGO Dysarthic Speech · Arabic Treebank BN (broadcast news) · GALE data – all phases and tasks · Digital Archive of Southern Speech · Chinese Dependency Treebank
In addition to receiving new publications, current year members of the LDC also enjoy the benefit of licensing older data at reduced costs; current year for-profit members may use most data for commercial applications. This past year, LDC members who joined early or kept their membership current saved almost US$70,000 collectively on membership fees. Be sure to keep an eye on your mail - all previous and current LDC members will be sent an invitation to join letter and renewal invoice for MY2012. Renew early for MY2012 to save today!
New Publications (1) 2006 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Set was developed by LDC and NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). It contains 595 hours of conversational telephone speech in English, Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Hindi, Korean, Russian, Thai and Urdu and associated English transcripts used as training data in the NIST-sponsored 2006 Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE). The ongoing series of SRE yearly evaluations conducted by NIST are intended to be of interest to researchers working on the general problem of text independent speaker recognition. The task of the 2006 SRE evaluation was speaker detection, that is, to determine whether a specified speaker is speaking during a given segment of conversational telephone speech. The task was divided into 15 distinct and separate tests involving one of five training conditions and one of four test conditions. Further information about the test conditions and additional documentation is available at the NIST web site for the 2006 SRE and within the 2006 SRE Evaluation Plan. The speech data in this release was collected by LDC as part of the Mixer project, in particular Mixer Phases 1, 2 and 3. The Mixer project supports the development of robust speaker recognition technology by providing carefully collected and audited speech from a large pool of speakers recorded simultaneously across numerous microphones and in different communicative situations and/or in multiple languages. The data is mostly English speech, but includes some speech in the above languages The telephone speech segments are multi-channel data collected simultaneously from a number of auxiliary microphones. The files are organized into three types: two-channel excerpts of approximately 10 seconds, two-channel conversations of approximately 5 minutes and summed-channel conversations also of approximately 5 minutes. English language transcripts in .ctm format were produced using an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. 2006 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Set is distributed on seven DVD-ROM. 2011 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2011 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$2000.
(2) 2006 NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program - Meeting Data Test Set Part 2 was developed by researchers at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Florida (USF), Tampa, Florida and the Multimodal Information Group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). It contains approximately twenty hours of meeting room video data collected in 2005 and 2006 and annotated for the VACE (Video Analysis and Content Extraction) 2006 face and person tracking tasks. The VACE program was established to develop novel algorithms for automatic video content extraction, multi-modal fusion, and event understanding. During VACE Phases I and II, the program made significant progress in the automated detection and tracking of moving objects including faces, hands, people, vehicles and text in four primary video domains: broadcast news, meetings, street surveillance, and unmanned aerial vehicle motion imagery. Initial results were also obtained on automatic analysis of human activities and understanding of video sequences. Three performance evaluations were conducted under the auspices of the VACE program between 2004 and 2007. In 2006, the VACE program and the European Union's Computers in the Human Interaction Loop (CHIL) collaborated to hold the Classification of Events, Activities and Relationships (CLEAR) Evaluation. This was an international effort to evaluate systems designed to analyze people, their identities, activities, interactions and relationships in human-human interaction scenarios, as well as related scenarios. The VACE program contributed the evaluation infrastructure (e.g., data, scoring, tools) for a specific set of tasks, and the CHIL consortium, coordinated by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, contributed a separate set of evaluation infrastructure. To the extent possible, the VACE and CHIL programs harmonized their evaluation protocols and metrics. The meeting room data used for the 2006 test set was collected by the following sites in 2005 and 2006: Carnegie Mellon University (USA), University of Edinburgh (Scotland), IDIAP Research Institute (Switzerland), NIST (USA), Netherlands organization for Applied Scientific Research (Netherlands) and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (USA). 2006 NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program - Meeting Data Test Set Part 2 is distributed on ten DVD-ROM. 2011 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2011 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$2500.
(3) Chinese Gigaword Fifth Edition was produced by LDC. It is a comprehensive archive of newswire text data that has been acquired from Chinese news sources by LDC at the University of Pennsylvania. Chinese Gigaword Fifth Edition includes all of the content of the fourth edition of Chinese Gigaword (LDC2009T27) plus new data covering the period from January 2009 through December 2010. Eight distinct sources of Chinese newswire are represented here: · Agence France Presse(afp_cmn) · Central News Agency, Taiwan(cna_cmn) · Central News Service(cns_cmn) · Guangming Daily(gmw_cmn) · People's Daily(pda_cmn) · People's Liberation Army Daily(pla_cmn) · Xinhua News Agency(xin_cmn) · Zaobao Newspaper(zbn_cmn) The seven-letter codes in the parentheses above are used for the directory names and data files for each source. Articles covering the period from January 2009 through December 2010 have been added to the Agence France Presse, Central News Agency (CNA), Central News Service, Guangming Daily, People's Liberation Army Daily and Xinhua News Agency data sets. The data from People's Daily covers the period from late June 2009 through December 2010. No new data from Zaobao has been added. Chinese Gigaword Fifth Edition is distributed on one DVD-ROM. 2011 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2011 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$6000. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ilya Ahtaridis Membership Coordinator -------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguistic Data Consortium Phone: 1 (215) 573-1275 University of Pennsylvania Fax: 1 (215) 573-2175 3600 Market St., Suite 810 ldc@ldc.upenn.edu Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA http://www.ldc.upenn.edu]]>http://www.luweixmu.com/home/default.asp?id=180<![CDATA[New Publications of Linguistic Data Consortium]]>adminhttp://www.luweixmu.com/home/luwig@xmu.edu.cn2011-10-25T10:07:05+08:002011-10-25T10:07:05+08:00 LDC2011S08 2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set LDC2011T11 Arabic Gigaword Fifth Edition LDC2011T12 Spanish Gigaword Third Edition -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fall 2011 LDC Data Scholarships recipients
LDC is pleased to announce the student recipients of the Fall 2011 LDC Data Scholarship program! The LDC Data Scholarship program provides university students with access to LDC data at no-cost. Data scholarships are offered twice a year to correspond to the Fall and Spring semesters. Students are asked to complete an application which consists of a data use proposal and letter of support from their academic adviser. LDC received many strong applications from students attending universities across the globe. We've reviewed all the applications, and after careful consideration, we have selected four scholarship recipients! These students will receive no-cost copies of LDC data: Haris B C - Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (India), Electronics & Electrical Engineering. Haris has been awarded a copy of 2005 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Data (LDC2011S01) and 2005 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Data (LDC2011S04) to evaluate the performance of a sparse representation speaker verification system. Friðjón Guðjohnsen - Reykjavik University (Iceland), Computer Science. Friðjón has been awarded a copy of Treebank-3 (LDC99T42) to be used in the development of tagging methods to improve the accuracy of tagging Icelandic texts. Leili Javadpour - Louisiana State University (USA), Engineering Science. Leili has been awarded a copy of BBN Pronoun Coreference and Entity Type Corpus (LDC2005T33) and Message Understanding Conference (MUC) 7 (LDC2001T02) for her work in pronominal anaphora resolution. Jad Makhlouta - American University of Beirut (Lebanon), Electrical and Computer Engineering. Jad has been awarded a copy of LDC Standard Arabic Morphological Analyzer (SAMA) Version 3.1 (LDC2010L01) for his work in Arabic text mining. Please join us in congratulating our student recipients! Look for our upcoming announcements about the submissions deadlines for the Spring 2012 LDC Data Scholarship program.
LDC data - now on Blu-ray! LDC is pleased to announce that the Blu-ray revolution has come to linguistic data! We are now offering select databases on Blu-ray Disc (BD). With BD, we'll be able to distribute some of our larger databases using a smaller number of discs. BDs also have the potential to be read more quickly than DVDs, which means faster access to data. To introduce our Blu-ray option, we would like to announce that the following databases will now be distributed on BD in addition to DVD-ROM: LDC2011T07 English Gigaword Fifth Edition, now available on 1 Blu-ray Disc LDC2006T13 Web 1T 5-gram Version 1, now available on 2 Blu-ray Discs organizations with licenses to English Gigaword Fifth Edition will be given the opportunity to 'swap' their DVDs for BDs. New licensees for Web 1T 5-gram have the option to select BD or DVD media. We expect to extend the BD option over time to other corpora in the catalog and to new releases.
LDC at NWAV 2011 NWAV’s 40th Anniversary Conference will be hosted by Georgetown University from October 27-30 and LDC will be on-hand to celebrate! Please stop by the LDC exhibition at any point during the main conference and be sure to attend LDC’s pre-conference workshop on “Demographic Coding for Sociolinguistic Corpus Archive Preparation” from 4.00 – 6.00 pm on Thursday, October 27. This workshop will be hosted by LDC Executive Director Christopher Cieri and Malcah Yaeger-Dror of the University of Arizona. It has two stated goals: 1) to catalog the need for more detailed demographic categories based on field experience that other researchers can and should exploit both for their own immediate analyses, and to facilitate sharing among research groups, and 2) to encourage the use of a core set of demographic metadata coding options. NWAV registration options can be found here. We hope to see you there! Please visit LDC’s Facebook page to follow our conference activities.
New publications (1) 2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set was developed by LDC and NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). It contains 942 hours of multilingual telephone speech and English interview speech along with transcripts and other materials used as test data in the 2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE). NIST SRE is part of an ongoing series of evaluations conducted by NIST. They are intended to be of interest to all researchers working on the general problem of text independent speaker recognition. The 2008 evaluation was distinguished from prior evaluations, in particular those in 2005 and 2006, by including not only conversational telephone speech data but also conversational speech data of comparable duration recorded over a microphone channel involving an interview scenario. LDC previously released the 2008 NIST SRE Training Set in two parts as LDC2011S05 and LDC2011S07. The speech data in this release was collected in 2007 by LDC at its Human Subjects Data Collection Laboratories in Philadelphia and by the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at the University of California, Berkeley. This collection was part of the Mixer 5 project, which was designed to support the development of robust speaker recognition technology by providing carefully collected and audited speech from a large pool of speakers recorded simultaneously across numerous microphones and in different communicative situations and/or in multiple languages. Mixer participants were native English and bilingual English speakers. The telephone speech in this corpus is predominantly English, but also includes the above languages. All interview segments are in English. Telephone speech represents approximately 368 hours of the data, whereas microphone speech represents the other 574 hours. English language transcripts in .cfm format were produced using an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. 2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set is distributed on 9 DVD-ROM. 2011 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2011 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$2000.
(2) Arabic Gigaword Fifth Edition is a comprehensive archive of newswire text data that has been acquired from Arabic news sources over several years by LDC. Arabic Gigaword Fifth Edition includes all of the content of the fourth edition of Arabic Gigaword (LDC2009T30) plus new data covering the period from January 1, 2009 through December 31, 2010. Nine distinct sources of Arabic newswire are represented in this distribution: Asharq Al-Awsat (aaw_arb) Agence France Presse (afp_arb) Al-Ahram (ahr_arb) Assabah (asb_arb) Al Hayat (hyt_arb) An Nahar (nhr_arb) Al-Quds Al-Arabi (qds_arb) Ummah Press (umh_arb) Xinhua News Agency (xin_arb) The seven-character codes shown above represent both the directory names where the data files are found, and the 7-letter prefix that appears at the beginning of every file name. The 7-letter codes consist of the three-character source name IDs and the three-character language code ("arb") separated by an underscore ("_") character. The three-character language code conforms to the ISO 639-3 standard. In addition to adding new data, the following updates were made: Repeated documents in Asharq Al-Awsat data from 2008 were removed. Document formatting and docid duplication problems were corrected in Agence France Presse data. Significant duplication of content in 2007-2008 An Nahar data was detected, and the duplicated documents were removed. Arabic Gigaword Fifth Edition is distributed on 1 DVD-ROM. 2011 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2011 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$6000.
(3) Spanish Gigaword Third Edition was produced by LDC. It is a comprehensive archive of Spanish newswire text data that has been acquired over several years by LDC. Spanish Gigaword Third Edition includes all of the content of the second edition (LDC2009T21) and adds data collected from January 1, 2009 through December 31, 2010. The three distinct international sources of Spanish newswire in this edition, and the time spans of collection covered for each, are as follows: Agence France-Presse, Spanish (afp_spa) May 1994 - Dec 2010 Associated Press, Spanish (apw_spa) Nov 1993 - Dec 2010 Xinhua News Agency, Spanish (xin_spa) Sep 2001 - Dec 2010 The seven-letter codes in the parentheses above include the three-character source name abbreviations and the three-character language code ("spa") separated by an underscore ("_") character. The three-letter language code conforms to LDC's internal convention based on the ISO 639-3 standard. All text data are presented in SGML/XML form, using a very simple, minimal markup structure; all text consists of printable ASCII, whitespace, and printable code points in the "Latin1 Supplement" character table, as defined by both ISO-8859-1 and the Unicode Standard (ISO 10646) for the "accented" characters used in Spanish. The Supplement/accented characters are rendered using UTF-8 encoding. Spanish Gigaword Third Edition is distributed on 1 DVD-ROM. 2011 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2011 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$4500. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ilya Ahtaridis Membership Coordinator -------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguistic Data Consortium Phone: 1 (215) 573-1275 University of Pennsylvania Fax: 1 (215) 573-2175 3600 Market St., Suite 810 ldc@ldc.upenn.edu Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA http://www.ldc.upenn.edu]]>http://www.luweixmu.com/home/default.asp?id=179<![CDATA[New Publications of Linguistic Data Consortium]]>adminhttp://www.luweixmu.com/home/luwig@xmu.edu.cn2011-10-25T10:06:25+08:002011-10-25T10:06:25+08:00 LDC2011S06- 2005 Spring NIST Rich Transcription (RT-05S) Evaluation Set - LDC2011S05- 2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Set Part 1 - LDC2011T09- Arabic Treebank: Part 2 v 3.1 - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fall 2011 LDC Data Scholarship Program Applications are now being accepted through September 15, 2011 for the Fall 2011 LDC Data Scholarship program! The LDC Data Scholarship program provides university students with access to LDC data at no-cost. During the previous two cycles of the program, LDC has awarded no-cost copies of LDC data valued at over US$25,000. 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 selection process is highly competitive. The application consists of two parts:
(1) Data Use Proposal. Applicants must submit a proposal describing their intended use of the data. The proposal must contain the applicant's name, university, and field of study. The proposal should state which data the student plans to use and contain a description of their research project. Applicants should consult the LDC Corpus Catalog for a complete list of data distributed by LDC. Due to certain restrictions, a handful of LDC corpora are restricted to members of the Consortium. Applicants are advised to select a maximum of one to two datasets; students may apply for additional datasets during the following cycle once they have completed processing of the initial datasets and publish or present work in some juried venue.
(2) Letter of Support. Applicants must submit one letter of support from their thesis adviser or department chair. The letter must confirm that the department or university lacks the funding to pay the full Non-member Fee for the data and verify the student's need for data. 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 Fall 2011 program cycle is September 15, 2011. Checking in with previous LDC Data Scholarship recipients LDC introduced the Data Scholarship program during the Fall 2010 semester. Since that time, more than fifteen individual students and student research groups have been awarded no-cost copies of LDC data for their research endeavors. Here is an update on the work of a few of our student recipients: Zachary Brooks - University of Arizona (USA), PhD Candidate, Second Language Acquisition and Teaching. Zachary and his research group were awarded a copy of ECI Multilingual Text (LDC94T5) for research in eye movement tracking by native and non-natives readers. Zachary used the ECI Multilingual Text data to test how second language readers process high and low frequency words in German. The results thus far show that processing a low frequency word can make it harder to process words that come next. The group's bilingual reading processes research is ongoing and Zachary anticipates the need to utilize additional speech and text corpora for future work. Benjamin Martinez Elizalde - Monterrey Institute of Technology and Superior Studies, ITESM (Mexico), graduate student, Computer Science. Benjamin was awarded a copy of Switchboard-1 Release 2 (LDC97S62) and 2002 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE) (LDC2004S04) to support his research in speaker verification modeling. Benjamin's group has prepared a robust Universal Background Model (UBM) and will use the Switchboard and 2002 NIST SRE data to run enrollment and test experiments once a lower baseline is achieved. The Switchboard and SRE data will also be used to prepare the system for the 2012 NIST SRE. Xiaohui Huang - Harbin Institute of Technology (China), Shenzhen Graduate School. Xiaohui and his research group were awarded a copy of TDT5 Topics and Annotations (LDC2006T19) for his work in topic detection and tracking for large-scale web data. Xiaohui extracted 607 documents from TDT5 Multilingual Text (LDC2006T18) and designed a new clustering approach for this data set. TDT5 Topics and Annotations (LDC2006T19 ) was used to label for measuring the precision of clustering. Xiaohui next compared his clustering approach with other text clustering approaches such as k-means and agglomerative hierarchical clustering and was able to achieve good performance. Since his group's method has been validated on small test data sets, next they will look to validate the system using larger text databases and time-series databases. Muhua Zhu - Northeastern University (China), graduate student, Natural Language Processing. Muhua was awarded a copy of Chinese Treebank (CTB) 7.0 (LDC2010T07) to support the development of a high-accuracy Chinese parser. Currently, Muhua is writing a survey paper on Chinese syntactic parsing which studies the performance of different parsing models on the versions of LDC's CTBs. Muhua had expected that parsing accuracy would increase with the additional data from CTB7.0, but accuracy decreased in some instances perhaps because of the inclusion of web text in CTB 7.0. Muhua next plans to use re-ranking methods for syntactic parsing and to extract a Combinatory Categorial Grammar bank (CCG bank) from CTB7.0. We'd like to thanks these students for providing an update on their research. Stay tuned for further reports from other data scholarship recipients. Weizmann Institute students are introduced to LDC data
LDC data was featured in an introductory speech recognition course at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. Visiting professor, Karen Livescu, of Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago and University of Chicago, Department of Computer Science used several LDC corpora, including CSR-I (WSJ0) Complete (LDC93S6A), Switchboard-1 Release 2 (LDC97S62), TIDIGITS (LDC93S10), and TIMIT Acoustic-Phonetic Continuous Speech Corpus (LDC93S1) for homework and term projects, with a few examples shown during in-class demonstration. The students enrolled in the course were computer science and mathematics graduate students and all were new to automatic speech recognition (ASR). They had backgrounds in probability, but no significant experience with the probabilistic models used in ASR, such as hidden Markov models and Gaussian mixtures. Livescu provided baseline recognizers that the students could modify, so that even beginning students could focus on specific components, while using real data with results in the literature to compare against. Since the students were provided with real data that the research community actively uses, students were motivated by the potential for 'real' results if their projects went as planned. As Livescu noted, 'while starting out in ASR from scratch is very difficult, the availability of toolkits and LDC data makes it possible for students in an introductory class to do productive research quite quickly'. Many thanks to Karen Livescu for sharing an example of how LDC data can be used for teaching purposes.
LDC Exhibiting at Interspeech 2011, Florence Italy LDC is returning to Europe to participate in Interspeech 2011. The conference will be held from August 28-31 at the Firenze Fiera, conveniently located near the Stazione di Santa Maria Novella. Please stop by LDC’s exhibition booth to say hello and learn more about current happenings at the Consortium. Interspeech 2011’s theme is ‘Speech Science and Technology for Real Life’. You may learn more about the conference here. The main conference will feature keynotes on the following topics: Speaking More Like You: Entrainment in Conversational Speech, Prof. Julia Hirschberg Neural Representations of Word Meanings, Prof. Tom Mitchell Honest Signals, Prof. Sandy Pentland Conference organizers have also scheduled a roundtable discussion for August 31st on ‘Future and Applications of Speech and Language Technologies for the Good Health of Society’ which will be led by Profs. Gabriele Miceli, Björn Granström and Hiroshi Ishiguro. You are encouraged to keep track of LDC’s Interspeech preparations on our Facebook page. We hope to see you there!
New Publications (1) 2005 Spring NIST Rich Transcription (RT-05S) Conference Meeting Evaluation Set was developed by LDC and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). It contains approximately 78 hours of English meeting speech, reference transcripts and other material used in the RT Spring 2005 evaluation. Rich Transcription (RT) is broadly defined as a fusion of speech-to-text (STT) technology and metadata extraction technologies providing the bases for the generation of more usable transcriptions of human-human speech in meetings. RT-05S included the following tasks in the meeting domain: Speech-To-Text (STT) - convert spoken words into streams of text Speaker Diarization (SPKR) - find the segments of time within a meeting in which each meeting participant is talking Speech Activity Detection (SAD) - detect when someone in a meeting space is talking Further information about the evaluation is available on the RT-05 Spring Evaluation Website. The data in this release consists of portions of meeting speech collected between 2001 and 2005 by the IDIAP Research Institute's Augmented Multi-Party Interaction project (AMI), Martigny, Switzerland; International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at University of California, Berkeley; Interactive Systems Laboratories (ISL) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh, PA; NIST; and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (VT), Blacksburg, VA. Each meeting excerpt contains a head-mic recording for each subject and one or more distant microphone recordings. Reference transcripts for the evaluation excerpts were prepared by LDC according to its Meeting Recording Careful Transcription Guidelines. Those specifications are designed to provide an accurate, verbatim (word-for-word) transcription, time-aligned with the audio file and including the identification of additional audio and speech signals with special mark-up. 2005 Spring NIST Rich Transcription (RT-05S) Conference Meeting Evaluation Set is distributed on 3 DVD-ROM. 2011 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2011 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for $2250.
(2) 2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Set Part 1 was developed by LDC and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). It contains 640 hours of multilingual telephone speech and English interview speech along with transcripts and other materials used as training data in the 2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE). SRE is part of an ongoing series of evaluations conducted by NIST. These evaluations are an important contribution to the direction of research efforts and the calibration of technical capabilities. They are intended to be of interest to all researchers working on the general problem of text independent speaker recognition. The 2008 evaluation was distinguished from prior evaluations, in particular those in 2005 and 2006, by including not only conversational telephone speech data but also conversational speech data of comparable duration recorded over a microphone channel involving an interview scenario. The speech data in this release was collected in 2007 by LDC at its Human Subjects Data Collection Laboratories in Philadelphia and by the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at the University of California, Berkley. This collection was part of the Mixer 5 project, which was designed to support the development of robust speaker recognition technology by providing carefully collected and audited speech from a large pool of speakers recorded simultaneously across numerous microphones and in different communicative situations and/or in multiple languages. Mixer participants were native English and bilingual English speakers. The telephone speech in this corpus is predominately English; all interview segments are in English. Telephone speech represents approximately 565 hours of the data, where as microphone speech represents the other 75 hours. The telephone speech segments include excerpts in the range of 8-12 seconds and 5 minutes from longer original conversations. The interview material includes short conversation interview segments of approximately 3 minutes from a longer interview session. English language transcripts in .cfm format were produced using an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. 2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Set Part 1 is distributed on 9 DVD-ROM. 2011 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2011 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for $2000.
(3) Arabic Treebank: Part 2 (ATB2) v 3.1 was developed at LDC. It consists of 501 newswire stories from Ummah Press with part-of-speech (POS), morphology, gloss and syntactic treebank annotation in accordance with the Penn Arabic Treebank (PATB) Guidelines developed in 2008 and 2009. This release represents a significant revision of LDC's previous ATB2 publication: Arabic Treebank: Part 2 v 2.0 LDC2004T02. The ongoing PATB project supports research in Arabic-language natural language processing and human language technology development. The methodology and work leading to the release of this publication are described in detail in the documentation accompanying this corpus and in two research papers: Enhancing the Arabic Treebank: A Collaborative Effort toward New Annotation Guidelines and Consistent and Flexible Integration of Morphological Annotation in the Arabic Treebank. ATB2 v 3.1 contains a total of 144,199 source tokens before clitics are split, and 169,319 tree tokens after clitics are separated for the treebank annotation. Source texts were selected from Ummah Press news archives covering the period from July 2001 through September 2002. Arabic Treebank: Part 2 v 3.1 is distributed via web download. 2011 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus on disc. 2011 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for $4500. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ilya Ahtaridis Membership Coordinator -------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguistic Data Consortium Phone: 1 (215) 573-1275 University of Pennsylvania Fax: 1 (215) 573-2175 3600 Market St., Suite 810 ldc@ldc.upenn.edu Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA http://www.ldc.upenn.edu]]>http://www.luweixmu.com/home/default.asp?id=178<![CDATA[New Publications of Linguistic Data Consortium]]>adminhttp://www.luweixmu.com/home/luwig@xmu.edu.cn2011-07-18T21:33:29+08:002011-07-18T21:33:29+08:00- LDC Sponsors a Student Group at 2011 International Linguistics Olympiad - - LDC Receives META Prize from META-NET -
New publications: - 2005 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Data - - 2006 NIST Spoken Term Detection Evaluation Set - - NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program - Meeting Data Test Set Part 2 - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- LDC Sponsors a Student Group at 2011 International Linguistics Olympiad LDC is happy to support the 2011 International Linguistics Olympiad by sponsoring a student team. The IOL is one of the twelve International Science Olympiads and is an annual event that brings together students from around the world to compete in linguistically–based challenges. This year’s competition takes place from July 24-30 at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA USA. Students do not need to have a background in linguistics in order to participate since they typically use analysis and deductive reasoning to solve the competition problems. Please visit the 2011 IOL website for additional details. We wish good luck to all of the participants!
LDC Receives META Prize from META-NET LDC was awarded a ‘2nd META Prize’ from META-NET ‘for outstanding long term commitment to the preparation and distribution of language resources and technologies.’ The META Prize is awarded by META-NET to those who provide outstanding products or services that support the European Multilingual Information Society. META-NET is a Network of Excellence dedicated to fostering the technological foundations of a multilingual European information society. Several organizations were honored at this year’s META Forum in Budapest; LDC and ELRA were both honored for supporting and developing language resources.
New Publications
(1) 2005 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Data was developed at LDC and NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). It consists of 525 hours of conversational telephone speech in English, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Russian and Spanish and associated English transcripts used as test data in the NIST-sponsored 2005 Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE). The ongoing series of SRE yearly evaluations conducted by NIST are intended to be of interest to researchers working on the general problem of text independent speaker recognition. To that end the evaluations are designed to be simple, to focus on core technology issues, to be fully supported and accessible. The task of the 2005 SRE evaluation was speaker detection, that is, to determine whether a specified speaker is speaking during a given segment of conversational speech. The task was divided into 20 distinct and separate tests involving one of five training conditions and one of four test conditions. Further information about the task conditions is contained in the The NIST Year 2005 Speaker Recognition Evaluation Plan. The speech data consists of conversational telephone speech with "multi-channel" data collected by LDC simultaneously from a number of auxiliary microphones. The files are organized into two segments: 10 second two-channel excerpts (continuous segments from single conversations that are estimated to contain approximately 10 seconds of actual speech in the channel of interest) and 5 minute two-channel conversations. The data are stored as 8-bit u-law speech signals in NIST SPHERE format. In addition to the standard header fields, the SPHERE header for each file contains some auxiliary information that includes the language of the conversation and whether the data was recorded over a telephone line. English language word transcripts in .cmt format were produced using an automatic speech recognition system (ASR) with error rates in the range of 15-30%. 2005 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Data is distributed on 7 DVD-ROM. 2011 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2011 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$2000.
(2) 2006 NIST Spoken Term Detection Evaluation Set was compiled by researchers at NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and contains approximately eighteen hours of Arabic, Chinese and English broadcast news, English conversational telephone speech and English meeting room speech used in NIST's 2006 Spoken Term Detection (STD) evaluation. The STD initiative is designed to facilitate research and development of technology for retrieving information from archives of speech data with the goals of exploring promising new ideas in spoken term detection, developing advanced technology incorporating these ideas, measuring the performance of this technology and establishing a community for the exchange of research results and technical insights. The 2006 STD task was to find all of the occurrences of a specified "term" (a sequence of one or more words) in a given corpus of speech data. The evaluation was intended to develop technology for rapidly searching very large quantities of audio data. Although the evaluation used modest amounts of data, it was structured to simulate the very large data situation and to make it possible to extrapolate the speed measurements to much larger data sets. Therefore, systems were implemented in two phases: indexing and searching. In the indexing phase, the system processes the speech data without knowledge of the terms. In the searching phase, the system uses the terms, the index, and optionally the audio to detect term occurrences. The evaluation corpus consists of three data genres: broadcast news (BNews), conversational telephone speech (CTS) and conference room meetings (CONFMTG). The broadcast news material was collected in 2003 and 2004 by LDC's broadcast collection system from the following sources: ABC (English), Aljazeera (Arabic), China Central TV (Chinese), CNN (English), CNBC (English), Dubaie TV (Arabic), New Tang Dynasty TV (Chinese), Public Radio International (English) and Radio Free Asia(Chinese). The CTS data was taken from the Switchboard data sets (e.g., Switchboard-2 Phase 1 LDC98S75, Switchboard-2 Phase 2 LDC99S79) and the Fisher corpora (e.g., Fisher English Training Speech Part 1 LDC2004S13), also collected by LDC. The conference room meeting material consists of goal-oriented, small group round table meetings and was collected in 2004 and 2005 by NIST, the International Computer Science Institute (Berkeley, California), Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA), TNO (The Netherlands) and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Blacksburg, VA) as part of the AMI corpus project. This evaluation corpus includes scoring software. It uses the inputs described in the STD Evaluation plan to complete the evaluation of a system. Each BNews recording is a 1-channel, pcm-encoded, 16Khz, SPHERE formatted file. CTS recordings are 2-channel, u-law encoded, 8 Khz, SPHERE formatted files. The CONFMTG files contain a single recorded channel. 2006 NIST Spoken Term Detection Evaluation Set is distributed on 1 DVD-ROM. 2011 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2011 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$800.
(3) NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program - Meeting Data Test Set Part 2 was developed by researchers at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Florida (USF), Tampa, Florida and the Multimodal Information Group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). It contains approximately thirteen hours of meeting room video data collected in 2001 and 2002 at NIST's Meeting Data Collection Laboratory and used in the VACE (Video Analysis and Content Extraction) 2005 evaluation. The VACE program was established to develop novel algorithms for automatic video content extraction, multi-modal fusion, and event understanding. During VACE Phases I and II, the program made significant progress in the automated detection and tracking of moving objects including faces, hands, people, vehicles and text in four primary video domains: broadcast news, meetings, street surveillance, and unmanned aerial vehicle motion imagery. Initial results were also obtained on automatic analysis of human activities and understanding of video sequences. Three performance evaluations were conducted under the auspices of the VACE program between 2004 and 2007. The 2005 evaluation was administered by USF in collaboration with NIST and guided by an advisory forum including the evaluation participants. LDC has previously released NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program -- Meeting Data Training Set Part 1 LDC2011V01, NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program -- Meeting Data Training Set Part 2 LDC2011V02 and NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program -- Meeting Data Test Set Part 1 LDC2011V03. NIST's Meeting Data Collection Laboratory is designed to collect corpora to support research, development and evaluation in meeting recognition technologies. It is equipped to look and sound like a conventional meeting space. The data collection facility includes five Sony EV1-D30 video cameras, four of which have stationary views of a center conference table (one view from each surrounding wall) with a fixed focus and viewing angle, and an additional "floating" camera which is used to focus on particular participants, whiteboard or conference table depending on the meeting forum. The data is captured in a NIST-internal file format. The video data was extracted from the NIST format and encoded using the MPEG-2 standard in NTSC format. Further information concerning the video data parameters can found in the documentation included with this corpus. NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program - Meeting Data Test Set Part 2 is distributed on 8 DVD-ROM. 2011 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2011 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$2500. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ilya Ahtaridis Membership Coordinator -------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguistic Data Consortium Phone: 1 (215) 573-1275 University of Pennsylvania Fax: 1 (215) 573-2175 3600 Market St., Suite 810 ldc@ldc.upenn.edu Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA http://www.ldc.upenn.edu]]>http://www.luweixmu.com/home/default.asp?id=177<![CDATA[New Publications of Linguistic Data Consortium]]>adminhttp://www.luweixmu.com/home/luwig@xmu.edu.cn2011-06-20T11:59:05+08:002011-06-20T11:59:05+08:00 - LDC is now on your favorite Social Networks - New Publications: LDC2011S02 - 2006 NIST Spoken Term Detection Development Set - LDC2011T08 - Datasets for Generic Relation Extraction (reACE) - LDC2011T07 - English Gigaword Fifth Edition -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- LDC at ACL: June 20-22 2011 ACL has returned to North America and LDC is taking this opportunity to interact with top HLT researchers in beautiful Portland, or. LDC’s exhibition table will feature information on new developments at the consortium and will also be the go-to point for exciting new, green giveaways. LDC’s Seth Kulick will be presenting research on ‘Using Derivation Trees for Treebank Error Detection’ (S-66) during Monday’s evening poster session (20 June, 6.00 – 8.30 pm). The abstract for this paper, coauthored by LDCers Ann Bies and Justin Mott, is as follows: This work introduces a new approach to checking treebank consistency. Derivation trees based on a variant of Tree Adjoining Grammar are used to compare the annotation of word sequences based on their structural similarity. This overcomes the problems of earlier approaches based on using strings of words rather than tree structure to identify the appropriate contexts for comparison. We report on the result of applying this approach to the Penn Arabic Treebank and how this approach leads to high precision of error detection. We hope to see you there. LDC is now on your favorite Social Networks (Facebook, LinkedIn and RSS, oh my!) Over the past few months, LDC has responded to requests from the community to increase our online presence. We are happy to announce that LDC now has its very own Facebook page, LinkedIn profile (independent of the University of Pennsylvania) and Blog, which provides an RSS feed for LDC newsletters. Please visit LDC on our various profiles and let us know what you think!
New Publications (1) 2006 NIST Spoken Term Detection Development Set was compiled by researchers at NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and contains eighteen hours of Arabic, Chinese and English broadcast news, English conversational telephone speech and English meeting room speech used in NIST's 2006 Spoken Term Detection (STD) evaluation. The STD initiative is designed to facilitate research and development of technology for retrieving information from archives of speech data with the goals of exploring promising new ideas in spoken term detection, developing advanced technology incorporating these ideas, measuring the performance of this technology and establishing a community for the exchange of research results and technical insights. The 2006 STD task was to find all of the occurrences of a specified term (a sequence of one or more words) in a given corpus of speech data. The evaluation was intended to develop technology for rapidly searching very large quantities of audio data. Although the evaluation used modest amounts of data, it was structured to simulate the very large data situation and to make it possible to extrapolate the speed measurements to much larger data sets. Therefore, systems were implemented in two phases: indexing and searching. In the indexing phase, the system processes the speech data without knowledge of the terms. In the searching phase, the system uses the terms, the index, and optionally the audio to detect term occurrences. The development corpus consists of three data genres: broadcast news (BN), conversational telephone speech (CTS) and conference room meetings (CONFMTG). The broadcast news material was collected in 2001 by LDC's broadcast collection system from the following sources: ABC (English), China Broadcasting System (Chinese), China Central TV (Chinese), China National Radio (Chinese), China Television System (Chinese), CNN (English), MSNBC/NBC (English), Nile TV (Arabic), Public Radio International (English) and Voice of America (Arabic, Chinese, English). The CTS data was taken from the Switchboard data sets (e.g., Switchboard-2 Phase 1 LDC98S75, Switchboard-2 Phase 2 LDC99S79) and the Fisher corpora (e.g., Fisher English Training Sppech Part 1 LDC2004S13), also collected by LDC. The conference room meeting material consists of goal-oriented, small group round table meetings and was collected in 2001, 2004 and 2005 by NIST, the International Computer Science Institute (Berkeley, California), Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA) and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Blacksburg, VA) as part of the AMI corpus project. Each BNews recording is a 1-channel, pcm-encoded, 16Khz, SPHERE formatted file. CTS recordings are 2-channel, u-law encoded, 8 Khz, SPHERE formatted files. TheCONFMTG files contain a single recorded channel. 2006 NIST Spoken Term Detection Development Set is distributed on 1 DVD-ROM. 2011 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2011 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$800. (2) Datasets for Generic Relation Extraction (reACE) was developed at The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland. It consists of English broadcast news and newswire data originally annotated for the ACE (Automatic Content Extraction) program to which the Edinburgh Regularized ACE (reACE) mark-up has been applied. The Edinburgh relation extraction (RE) task aims to identify useful information in text (e.g., PersonW works for organisationX, GeneY encodes ProteinZ) and to recode it in a format such as a relational database or RDF triple store (a database for the storage and retrieval of Resource Description Framework (RDF) metadata) that can be more effectively used for querying and automated reasoning. A number of resources have been developed for training and evaluation of automatic systems for RE in different domains. However, comparative evaluation is impeded by the fact that these corpora use different markup formats and different notions of what constitutes a relation. reACE solves this problem by converting data to a common document type using token standoff and including detailed linguistic markup while maintaining all information in the original annotation. The subsequent re-annotation process normalizes the two data sets so that they comply with a notion of relation that is intuitive, simple and informed by the semantic web. The data in this corpus consists of newswire and broadcast news material from ACE 2004 Multilingual Training Corpus LDC 2005T09 and ACE 2005 Multilingual Training Corpus LDC2006T06 . This material has been standardized for evaluation of multi-type RE across domains. Annotation includes (1) a refactored version of the original data to a common XML document type; (2) linguistic information from LT-TTT (a system for tokenizing text and adding markup) and MINIPAR (an English parser); and (3) a normalized version of the original RE markup that complies with a shared notion of what constitutes a relation across domains. The data sources represented in the corpus were collected by LDC in 2000 and 2003 and consist of the following: ABC, Agence France Presse, Associated Press, Cable News Network, MSNBC/NBC, New York Times, Public Radio International, Voice of America and Xinhua News Agency. Datasets for Generic Relation Extraction (reACE) is distributed via web download. 2011 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus on disc. 2011 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$800. (3) English Gigaword Fifth Edition is a comprehensive archive of newswire text data that has been acquired over several years by the LDC at the University of Pennsylvania. The fifth edition includes all of the contents in English Gigaword Fourth Edition (LDC2009T13) plus new data covering the 24-month period of January 2009 through December 2010. The seven distinct international sources of English newswire included in this edition are the following: Agence France-Presse, English Service (afp_eng) Associated Press Worldstream, English Service (apw_eng) Central News Agency of Taiwan, English Service (cna_eng) Los Angeles Times/Washington Post Newswire Service (ltw_eng) Washington Post/Bloomberg Newswire Service (wpb_eng) New York Times Newswire Service (nyt_eng) Xinhua News Agency, English Service (xin_eng) The seven letter codes in the parentheses above include the three-character source name abbreviations and the three-character language code ("eng") separated by an underscore ("_") character. The three-letter language code conforms to LDC's internal convention based on the ISO 639-3 standard.
Data The following table sets forth the overall totals for each source. Note that "Total-MB" refers to the quantity of date when unzipped (approximately 26 gigabytes), "Gzip-MB" refers to compressed file sizes as stored on the DVD-ROMs and "K-wrds" refers to the number of whitespace-separated tokens (of all types) after all SGML tags are eliminated: Source #Files Gzip-MB Totl-MB K-wrds #DOCs afp_eng 146 1732 4937 738322 2479624 apw_eng 193 2700 7889 1186955 3107777 cna_eng 144 86 261 38491 145317 ltw_eng 127 651 1694 268088 411032 nyt_eng 197 3280 8938 1422670 1962178 wpb_eng 12 42 111 17462 26143 xin_eng 191 834 2518 360714 1744025 TOTAL 1010 9325 26348 4032686 9876086
English Gigaword Fifth Edition is distributed on 3 DVD-ROM. 2011 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2011 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$6000. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ilya Ahtaridis Membership Coordinator -------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguistic Data Consortium Phone: 1 (215) 573-1275 University of Pennsylvania Fax: 1 (215) 573-2175 3600 Market St., Suite 810 ldc@ldc.upenn.edu Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA http://www.ldc.upenn.edu]]>http://www.luweixmu.com/home/default.asp?id=176<![CDATA[New Publications of Linguistic Data Consortium]]>adminhttp://www.luweixmu.com/home/luwig@xmu.edu.cn2011-05-25T08:33:00+08:002011-05-25T08:33:00+08:00LDC2011S01 - NIST 2005 Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Data - LDC2011V03 - NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program - Meeting Data Test Set Part 3 - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Early Renewing Members Save Again! Once again, LDC's early renewal discount program has resulted in significant savings for our members! For Membership Year (MY) 2011, about 120 organizations that renewed membership or joined early received a discount on their membership fees. Taken together, these members saved almost US$70,000! MY 2010 members are reminded that they are still eligible for a 5% discount when renewing. This discount will apply throughout 2011, regardless of time of renewal. By joining for MY 2011, any organization can take advantage of membership benefits including free membership year data as well as discounts on older LDC corpora. Please visit our Members FAQ for further information. LDC to Close for Memorial Day - May 30, 2011 LDC would like to inform our customers that we will be closed on Monday, May 30, 2011 in observance of the US Memorial Day holiday. Our offices will reopen on Tuesday, May 31, 2011.
New Publications
(1) 2005 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Data was developed at LDC and NIST (National Insitute of Standards and Technology). It consists of 392 hours of conversational telephone speech in English, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Russian and Spanish and associated English transcripts used as training data in the NIST-sponsored 2005 Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE). The ongoing series of SRE yearly evaluations conducted by NIST are intended to be of interest to researchers working on the general problem of text independent speaker recognition. To that end the evaluations are designed to be simple, to focus on core technology issues, to be fully supported and to be accessible to those wishing to participate. The task of the 2005 SRE evaluation was speaker detection, that is, to determine whether a specified speaker is speaking during a given segment of conversational speech. The task was divided into 20 distinct and separate tests involving one of five training conditions and one of four test conditions. The speech data consists of conversational telephone speech with "multi-channel" data collected simultaneously from a number of auxiliary microphones. The files are organized into two segments: 10 second two-channel excerpts (continuous segments from single conversations that are estimated to contain approximately 10 seconds of actual speech in the channel of interest) and 5 minute two-channel conversations. The speech files are stored as 8-bit u-law speech signals in separate SPHERE files. In addition to the standard header fields, the SPHERE header for each file contains some auxiliary information that includes the language of the conversation and whether the data was recorded over a telephone line. English language word transcripts in .cmt format were produced using an automatic speech recognition system (ASR) and contain error rates in the range of 15-30%. 2005 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Data is distributed on 6 DVD-ROM. 2011 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2011 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$2000.
(2) NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program - Meeting Data Test Set Part 3, Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) catalog number LDC2011V03 and isbn 1-58563-579-0, was developed by researchers at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Florida (USF), Tampa, Florida and the Multimodal Information Group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). It contains approximately eleven hours of meeting room video data collected in 2001 and 2002 at NIST's Meeting Data Collection Laboratory and annotated for the VACE (Video Analysis and Content Extraction) 2005 face, person and hand detection and tracking tasks. The VACE program was established to develop novel algorithms for automatic video content extraction, multi-modal fusion, and event understanding. During VACE Phases I and II, the program made significant progress in the automated detection and tracking of moving objects including faces, hands, people, vehicles and text in four primary video domains: broadcast news, meetings, street surveillance, and unmanned aerial vehicle motion imagery. Initial results were also obtained on automatic analysis of human activities and understanding of video sequences. Three performance evaluations were conducted under the auspices of the VACE program between 2004 and 2007. The 2005 evaluation was administered by USF in collaboration with NIST and guided by an advisory forum including the evaluation participants. A summary of results of the evaluation can be found in the 2005 VACE results and analysis paper included in this release. NIST's Meeting Data Collection Laboratory is designed to collect corpora to support research, development and evaluation in meeting recognition technologies. It is equipped to look and sound like a conventional meeting space. The data collection facility includes five Sony EV1-D30 video cameras, four of which have stationary views of a center conference table (one view from each surrounding wall) with a fixed focus and viewing angle, and an additional "floating" camera which is used to focus on particular participants, whiteboard or conference table depending on the meeting forum. The data is captured in a NIST-internal file format. The video data was extracted from the NIST format and encoded using the MPEG-2 standard in NTSC format. Further information concerning the video data parameters can found in the documentation included with this corpus. NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program - Meeting Data Test Set Part 3 is distributed on 7 DVD-ROM. 2011 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2011 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$2500. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ilya Ahtaridis Membership Coordinator -------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguistic Data Consortium Phone: 1 (215) 573-1275 University of Pennsylvania Fax: 1 (215) 573-2175 3600 Market St., Suite 810 ldc@ldc.upenn.edu Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA http://www.ldc.upenn.edu]]>http://www.luweixmu.com/home/default.asp?id=175<![CDATA[New Publications of Linguistic Data Consortium]]>adminhttp://www.luweixmu.com/home/luwig@xmu.edu.cn2011-03-30T21:58:09+08:002011-03-30T21:58:09+08:00- Spring 2011 LDC Data Scholarship Recipients - - LDC at NEALLT 2011- New publications: - 2008/2010 NIST Metrics for Machine Translation (MetricsMaTr) GALE Evaluation Set - - NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program – Meeting Data Training Set Part 1 - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Spring 2011 LDC Data Scholarship Recipients LDC is pleased to announce the student recipients of the Spring 2011 LDC Data Scholarship program! The LDC Data Scholarship program provides university students with access to LDC data at no-cost. Students were asked to complete an application which consisted of a proposal describing their intended use of the data, as well as a letter of support from their thesis adviser. LDC received many solid applications from both undergraduate and graduate students attending universities across the globe. After careful deliberation, we have chosen eight proposals to support. These students will receive no-cost copies of LDC data: Roberto Aceves - Monterrey Institute of Technology and Superior Studies, ITESM (Mexico), graduate student, Computer Science. Roberto has been awarded a copy of the Speech in Noisy Environments (SPINE) database for his research in automatic speech recognition in noisy environments. Daniel Escobar - Monterrey Institute of Technology and Superior Studies, ITESM (Mexico), graduate student, Mechatronics and Automation. Daniel has been awarded a copy of Switchboard-2 and NIST SRE for designing a parallel joint factor analysis architecture for a speaker verification system. Erhan Guven - The George Washington University (USA), graduate student, Computer Science. Erhan has been awarded a copy of Emotional Prosody (LDC2002S28) for his work in extracting speaker emotional state from spectrograms. Anup Kolya - Jadavpur University (India), graduate student, Computer Science and Engineering. Anup has been awarded a copy of ACE 2005 English SpatialML Annotations (LDC2008T03), ACE Time Normalization (TERN) 2004 English Evaluation Data V1.0 (LDC2010T18), and ACE Time Normalization (TERN) 2004 English Training Data v 1.0 (LDC2005T07) for his research in temporal information extraction. Benjamín Martínez Elizalde - Monterrey Institute of Technology and Superior Studies, ITESM (Mexico), graduate student, Computer Science. Benjamín has been awarded a copy of Switchboard-2 and NIST SRE to support his research in speaker verification modeling. Hanan Waer - Newcastle University (UK), graduate student, Educational and Applied Linguistics. Hanan has been awarded a copy of CALLHOME Egyptian Arabic Transcripts (LDC97T19), CALLHOME Egyptian Arabic Transcripts Supplement (LDC2002T38), and Egyptian Colloquial Arabic Lexicon (LDC99L22) for her research in comparing Arabic/English code switching in everyday Arabic conversation and academic discourse. Muhua Zhu - Northeastern University (China), graduate student, Natural Language Processing. Muhua has been awarded a copy of Chinese Treebank 7.0 (LDC2010T07) to support the development of a high-accuracy Chinese parser. Vignesh Kalaiselvan, Ganapathy Raman Kasi, Preetham Samue, Ramsrinivas Anantharamakrishnan, and Sathyanarayan Jeevan - Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham University (India), undergraduate students, Electronics and Communication Engineering - the group has been awarded CALLHOME Speech, Transcripts, and Lexicon in Egyptian Arabic and German for their research in deriving robust features for multilingual acoustic modeling. Please join us in congratulating our student winners! The next LDC Data Scholarship program is scheduled for the Fall 2011 semester.
LDC at NEALLT 2011 LDC will be exhibiting at the upcoming NEALLT (North East Association for Language Learning Technology) conference, which will be held at the University of Pennsylvania from 1-3 April 2011. NEALLT is the regional chapter of the International Association for Language Learning Technology and works to improve language instruction through the use of technology. How resources developed and distributed by LDC can aid language education will be discussed by LDC’s Dr Mohamed Maamouri in the presentation “Incorporating Resources and New Technologies in Language Education” on Saturday, April 2 (Session 9: 4.00-4.20 pm, Cohen G17). That presentation will highlight the LDC Arabic Reading Enhancement Tool, designed to support the development of reading skills for learning Arabic as a first and second language. We hope to see you there!
New Publications (1) 2008/2010 NIST Metrics for Machine Translation (MetricsMaTr) GALE Evaluation Set (LDC2011T05) is a package containing source data, reference translations, machine translations and associated human judgments used in the NIST 2008 and 2010 MetricsMaTr evaluations. The package was compiled by researchers at NIST, making use of Arabic and Chinese broadcast, newswire and web data and reference translations collected and developed by LDC for Phase 2 and Phase 2.5 of the DARPA GALE program. NIST MetricsMaTr is a series of research challenge events for machine translation (MT) metrology, promoting the development of innovative MT metrics that correlate highly with human assessments of MT quality. Participants submit their metrics to NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). NIST runs those metrics on certain held-back test data for which it has human assessments measuring quality and then calculates correlations between the automatic metric scores and the human assessments. Specifically, the goals of MetricsMATR are: to inform other MT technology evaluation campaigns and conferences with regard to improved metrology; to establish an infrastructure that encourages the development of innovative metrics; to build a diverse community that will bring new perspectives to MT metrology research; and to provide a forum for MT metrology discussion and for establishing future directions of MT metrology. The first MetricsMaTr challenge was held in 2008; the development data from the 2008 program is available from LDC, 2008 NIST Metrics for Machine Translation (MetricsMATR08) Development Data LDC2009T05. The MetricsMaTr10 evaluation plan is included in this release. This release contains 149 documents with corresponding reference translations (Arabic-to-English and Chinese-to-English), system translations and human assessments. The human assessments include the following: Adequacy7 (a 7-point scale for judging the meaning of a system translation with respect to the reference translation); Adequacy Yes/No (whether the given system segment meant essentially the same as the reference translation); Preference (the judges' preference between two candidate translations when compared to a human reference translation); and HTER (Human Targeted Error Rate, human edits to a system translation to have the same meaning as a reference translation). 2008/2010 NIST Metrics for Machine Translation (MetricsMaTr) GALE Evaluation Set is distributed via web download. 2011 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus on disc. 2011 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$250.
(2) NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program – Meeting Data Training Set Part 1 (LDC2011V01) was developed by researchers at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Florida (USF), Tampa, Florida and the Multimodal Information Group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). It contains approximately fifteen hours of meeting room video data collected in 2001 and 2002 at NIST's Meeting Data Collection Laboratory and annotated for the VACE (Video Analysis and Content Extraction Program) 2005 face, person and hand detection and tracking tasks. The VACE program was established to develop novel algorithms for automatic video content extraction, multi-modal fusion, and event understanding. During VACE Phases I and II, the program made significant progress in the automated detection and tracking of moving objects including faces, hands, people, vehicles and text in four primary video domains: broadcast news, meetings, street surveillance, and unmanned aerial vehicle motion imagery. Initial results were also obtained on automatic analysis of human activities and understanding of video sequences. Three performance evaluations were conducted under the auspices of the VACE program between 2004 and 2007. The 2005 evaluation was administered by USF in collaboration with NIST and guided by an advisory forum including the evaluation participants. NIST's Meeting Data Collection Laboratory is designed to collect corpora to support research, development and evaluation in meeting recognition technologies. It is equipped to look and sound like a conventional meeting space. The data collection facility includes five Sony EV1-D30 video cameras, four of which have stationary views of a center conference table with a fixed focus and viewing angle, and an additional "floating" camera which is used to focus on particular participants, whiteboard or conference table depending on the meeting forum. The data is captured in a NIST-internal file format. The video data was extracted from the NIST format and encoded using the MPEG-2 standard in NTSC format. NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program -- Meeting Data Training Set Part 1 is distributed on eight DVD-ROM. 2011 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2011 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$2500. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ilya Ahtaridis Membership Coordinator -------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguistic Data Consortium Phone: 1 (215) 573-1275 University of Pennsylvania Fax: 1 (215) 573-2175 3600 Market St., Suite 810 ldc@ldc.upenn.edu Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA http://www.ldc.upenn.edu]]>http://www.luweixmu.com/home/default.asp?id=174<![CDATA[New Publications of Linguistic Data Consortium]]>adminhttp://www.luweixmu.com/home/luwig@xmu.edu.cn2011-02-07T09:55:59+08:002011-02-07T09:55:59+08:00- LDC Data Scholarship Program Deadline - January 31, 2011 - - Membership Discounts for MY 2011 Still Available - New publications: - ACE 2005 English SpatialML Annotations Version 2 - - SemEval-2010 Task 1 OntoNotes English: Coreference Resolution in Multiple Languages - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- LDC Data Scholarship Program Deadline - January 31, 2011 The deadline for the Spring 2011 LDC Data Scholarship Program is fast approaching! Applications are now being accepted through January 31, 2011. 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 Scholarship program. Decisions will be sent by email from the same address. Membership Discounts for MY 2011 Still Available If you are considering joining for Membership Year 2011 (MY2011), there is still time to save on membership fees. Any organization which joins or renews membership for 2011 through Tuesday, March 1, 2011, is entitled to a 5% discount on membership fees. organizations which held membership for MY2010 can receive a 10% discount on fees provided they renew prior to March 1, 2011. For further information on pricing, please consult our Announcements page or contact LDC.
New Publications
(1) ACE 2005 English SpatialML Annotations Version 2 was developed by researchers at The MITRE Corporation and applies SpatialML tags to the English newswire and broadcast training data annotated for entities, relations and events in ACE 2005 Multilingual Training Corpus LDC2006T06. This second version eliminates a number of annotation inconsistencies and errors identified in ACE 2005 English SpatialML Annotations LDC2008T03. In addition, the SpatialML annotation schema has been updated from version 2.0 to version 3.0.1; the revised annotation guidelines are included in this release. The ACE (Automatic Content Extraction) program focused on developing automatic content extraction technology to support automatic processing of human language in text form., specifically, entities, values, temporal expressions, relations and events. SpatialML is a mark-up language for representing spatial expressions in natural language documents. It is intended to emulate earlier progress on time expression such as TIMEX2, TimeML, and the 2005 ACE guidelines. SpatialML includes syntax for marking up PLACEs mentioned in text and for linking them to data from gazetteers and other databases. LINKs are used to express relations between places, and RLINKs to capture trajectories for relative locations. To the extent possible, SpatialML leverages ISO and other standards with the goal of making the scheme compatible with existing and future corpora. SpatialML goes beyond these schemes, however, in terms of providing a richer markup for natural language that includes semantic features and relationships that allow mapping to existing resources such as gazetteers. Such markup can be useful for disambiguation, integration with mapping services and spatial reasoning. This corpus contains 210065 total words and 17821 unique words. Counts of unique words can be found in doc/ldc_wordcount.csv which includes all words that are not part of XML markup (e.g., without tag names, attribute names or values). Unique words are counted by comparing case insensitive transformations with preceding and trailing punctuation stripped off. "Words" consisting solely of punctuation are discarded. The principal change in the annotation schema is that "PATH" has been generalized to "RLINK" for relative link. At the top level, there is now a version attribute on the root SpatialML tag to capture which version of SpatialML was used. A number of smaller changes have been made to the annotation specification; these are listed in Section 2 of the updated guidelines. ACE 2005 English SpatialML Annotations Version 2 is distributed via web download. 2011 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus on disc. 2011 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$1000.
(2) SemEval-2010 Task 1 OntoNotes English: Coreference Resolution in Multiple Languages is a subset of OntoNotes Release 2.0 LDC2008T04 used in SemEval-2010 Task 1, Coreference Resolution in Multiple Languages. OntoNotes Release 2.0 consists of roughly 500,000 words of English broadcast and newswire data annotated with structural information (syntax and predicate argument structure) and shallow semantics (word sense linked to an ontology and coreference). This SemEval-2010 Task 1 release contains approximately 120,000 words extracted from the OntoNotes corpus and formatted for the SemEval task. SemEval (Semantic Evaluation) is an ongoing series of evaluations of computational semantic analysis systems. The goal of SemEval-2010 Task 1 was to evaluate and compare automatic coreference resolution systems for six languages (Catalan, Dutch, English, German, Italian and Spanish) in four evaluation settings using four metrics. Further information about Task 1 can be found on the task description website. The data is divided into three sets: the development set which contains 39 documents, 741 sentences and 17,044 tokens; the training set which contains 229 documents, 3,648 sentences and 79,060 tokens; and the test set which contains 85 documents, 1,141 sentences and 24,206 tokens. The complete material for training systems is the sum of the development and training sets. SemEval-2010 Task 1 OntoNotes English: Coreference Resolution in Multiple Languages is distributed via web download. 2011 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus on disc. 2011 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may request this data by completing a copy of the LDC User Agreement for Non-Members. The agreement can be faxed +1 215 573 2175 or scanned and emailed to this address. This data is available at no charge. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ilya Ahtaridis Membership Coordinator -------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguistic Data Consortium Phone: 1 (215) 573-1275 University of Pennsylvania Fax: 1 (215) 573-2175 3600 Market St., Suite 810 ldc@ldc.upenn.edu Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA http://www.ldc.upenn.edu]]>http://www.luweixmu.com/home/default.asp?id=173<![CDATA[New Publications of Linguistic Data Consortium ]]>adminhttp://www.luweixmu.com/home/luwig@xmu.edu.cn2010-11-18T10:45:16+08:002010-11-18T10:45:16+08:00 LDC values the significant contribution LDC members make through their continued support of the consortium. We would like to invite new members, as well as all current and previous members of LDC, to renew for Membership Year (MY) 2011. For MY2011, LDC is pleased to maintain membership fees at last year’s rates – membership fees will not increase. Additionally, for the third straight year, 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 MY2011 are as follows: organizations who joined for MY2010, will receive a 5% discount when renewing. This discount will apply throughout 2011, regardless of time of renewal. MY2010 members renewing before March 1, 2011 will receive an additional 5% discount, for a total 10% discount off the membership fee. New members as well as organizations who did not join for MY2010, but who held membership in any of the previous MYs (1993-2009), will also be eligible for a 5% discount provided that they join/renew before March 1, 2011. The following table provides exact pricing information.
* For new members, MY2010 Members renewing for MY2011, and any previous year Member who renews before March 1, 2011
** For MY2010 Members renewing before March 1, 2011
Publications for MY2011 are still being planned and here are the working titles of data sets we intend to provide:
Arabic Gigaword Fifth Edition English Gigaword Fifth Edition Chinese Gigaword Fifth Edition Indian Language POS Tagset: Sanskrit Digital Archive of Southern Speech OntoNotes 4.0
In addition to receiving new publications, current year members of the LDC also enjoy the benefit of licensing older data at reduced costs; current year for-profit members may use most data for commercial applications.
This past year, the LDC members who joined early or kept their membership current saved almost US$60,000 collectively on membership fees. In fact, almost 90% of our members for MY2010 didn't pay full price for membership! Be sure to keep an eye on your mail - all previous and current LDC members have been sent an invitation to join letter and renewal invoice for MY2011. Renew early for MY2011 to save today!
LDC to Close for Thanksgiving Break
The LDC would like to inform our customers that we will be closed on Thursday, November 25, 2010 and Friday, November 26, 2010 in observance of the US Thanksgiving Holiday. Our offices will reopen on Monday, November 29, 2010.
New Publications
(1) Arabic Treebank: Part 1 v 4.1 was developed at LDC. It consists of 734 newswire stories from Agence France Presse with part-of-speech , morphology, gloss and syntactic treebank annotation in accordance with the Penn Arabic Treebank (PATB) Guidelines developed in 2008 and 2009. This release represents a significant revision of LDC's previous ATB1 publications: Arabic Treebank: Part 1 v 2.0 (LDC2003T06) and Arabic Treebank: Part 1 v 3.0 (POS with full vocalization + syntactic analysis) (LDC2005T02).
The ongoing PATB project supports research in Arabic-language natural language processing and human language technology development. The methodology and work leading to the release of this publication are described in detail in the documentation accompanying this corpus and in two research papers: Enhancing the Arabic Treebank: A Collaborative Effort toward New Annotation Guidelines and Consistent and Flexible Integration of Morphological Annotation in the Arabic Treebank.
ATB1 v 4.1 contains a total of 145,386 tokens before clitics are split, and 167,280 tokens after clitics are separated for the treebank annotation. Arabic Treebank: Part 1 v 4.1 is distributed on one DVD-ROM.
2010 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2010 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$4500.
(2) NIST 2008 Open Machine Translation (OpenMT) Evaluation is a package containing source data, reference translations and scoring software used in the NIST 2008 OpenMT evaluation. It is designed to help evaluate the effectiveness of machine translation systems. The package was compiled and scoring software was developed by researchers at NIST, making use of broadcast, newswire and web data and reference translations collected and developed by LDC.
The 2008 task was to evaluate translation from Arabic to English, Chinese to English, English to Chinese (newswire only) and Urdu to English. Selected human reference translations and system translations for the NIST MT08 test sets are contained in NIST Open Machine Translation 2008 Evaluation (MT08) Selected Reference and System Translations LDC2010T01.
This release contains of 494 documents with corresponding sets of four separate human expert reference translations. The source data is comprised of Arabic, Chinese, English and Urdu news wire, broadcast and weblog and newsgroup data collected by LDC in 2007. The news wire and broadcast material are from Asharq Al-Awsat (Arabic), Agence France-Presse (Arabic, Chinese, English), Al-Ahram (Arabic), Al Hayat (Arabic), Assabah (Arabic), An Nahar (Arabic), Al-Quds Al-Arabi (Arabic), Xinhua News Agency (Arabic, Chinese, English), Central News Service (Chinese), Guangming Daily (Chinese), People's Daily (Chinese), People's Liberation Army Daily (Chinese), British Broadcasting Corporation (Urdu), Daily Jang (Urdu), Pakistan News Service (Urdu), Voice of America (Urdu), Associated Press (English), New York Times (English) and Los Angeles Times/Washington Post Newswire Service (English).
This evaluation kit includes a single Perl script (mteval-v11b.pl) that may be used to produce a translation quality score for one (or more) MT systems.
Additional information about these evaluations may be found at the NIST Open Machine Translation (OpenMT) Evaluation web site.
NIST 2008 Open Machine Translation (OpenMT) Evaluation is distributed via web download.
2010 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus on disc. 2010 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$150. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ilya Ahtaridis Membership Coordinator -------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguistic Data Consortium Phone: 1 (215) 573-1275 University of Pennsylvania Fax: 1 (215) 573-2175 3600 Market St., Suite 810 ldc@ldc.upenn.edu Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA http://www.ldc.upenn.edu]]>http://www.luweixmu.com/home/default.asp?id=172<![CDATA[New Publications of Linguistic Data Consortium ]]>adminhttp://www.luweixmu.com/home/luwig@xmu.edu.cn2010-10-17T15:02:21+08:002010-10-17T15:02:21+08:00- Fall 2010 LDC Data Scholarship Winners! - - LDC at Interspeech 2010 - - Commercial Use of LDC Data - - Position Openings at LDC -
New Publications: LDC2010T18- ACE Time Normalization (TERN) 2004 English Evaluation Data V1.0 - LDC2010T19- Korean Newswire Second Edition - LDC2010T17- NIST 2006 Open Machine Translation (OpenMT) Evaluation - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fall 2010 LDC Data Scholarship Winners! LDC is pleased to announce the winners in our first-ever LDC Data Scholarship program! The LDC Data Scholarship program provides university students with access to LDC data at no-cost. Data scholarships are offered twice a year to correspond to the Fall and Spring semesters. Students are asked to complete an application which consists of a data use proposal and letter of support from their academic adviser. LDC received many strong applications from both undergraduate and graduate students attending universities across the globe. The decision process was difficult, and after much deliberation, we have selected eight winners! These students will receive no-cost copies of LDC data valued at over US$10,000: Aby Abraham - Ohio University (USA), graduate student, Electrical Engineering. Aby has been awarded a copy of 2003 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation (LDC2010S03) for his work in using long term memory cells for continuous speech recognition. Ripandy Adha - Bandung Institute of Technology (Indonesia), undergraduate student, Computer Science - Ripandy has been awarded a copy of American English Spoken Lexicon (LDC99L23) to assist in the development of a voice command internet browser. Basawaraj - Ohio University (USA), PhD candidate, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Basawaraj has been awarded a copy of NIST 2002 Open Machine Translation (OpenMT) Evaluation (LDC2010T10) to assist in fine tuning his machine translation system and to provide a benchmark dataset. Zachary Brooks - University of Arizona (USA), PhD Candidate, Second Language Acquisition and Teaching. Zachary and his research group have been awarded a copy of ECI Multilingual Text (LDC94T5) for research in eye movement tracking by native and non-natives readers. Marco Carmosino - Hampshire College (USA), undergraduate student, Computer Science. Marco has been awarded a copy of English Gigaword Fourth Edition (LDC2009T13) for his work in narrative chain extraction. Xiaohui Huang - Harbin Institute of Technology (China), Shenzhen Graduate School. Xiaohui has been awarded a copy of TDT5 Topics and Annotations (LDC2006T19) for his work in topic detection and tracking for large-scale web data. Yuhuan Zhou - PLA University of Science and Technology (China), postgraduate student, Institute of Communications Engineering. Yuhuan has been awarded a copy of 2002 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation (LDC2004S04) to assist in the development of a speaker recognition system which fuses support vector data description (SVDD) and Gaussian mixture model (GMM). Speaker Recognition Group (GEDA) with members Matias Fineschi, Gonzalo Lavigna, Jorge Prendes, and Pablo Vacatello - Buenos Aires Institute of Technology (Argentina), Department of Electrical Engineering. GEDA has been awarded a copy of 2004 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation (LDC2006S44) to assist in the development of a flexible platform on speaker verification capable of implementing different feature extraction, normalizations, stochastical models and outputs. Please join us in congratulating our student winners! The next LDC Data Scholarship program is scheduled for the Spring 2011 semester. Stay tuned for further announcements.
LDC at Interspeech 2010 We would like to thank all of the Interspeech 2010 attendees who stopped by the LDC display in Makuhari Japan. We had the chance to interact with a great mix of speech researchers from around the globe, and we hope that we were able to answer your questions about the Consortium. The exhibition hall also provided LDC with an opportunity to showcase the new additions to our Data Sheet collection, which continue to be printed on FSC-certified 30% recycled paper. The most frequently-asked questions from conference attendees concerned which Asian languages and corresponding data types are represented in the LDC Catalog. Over the past 18 years, we have produced nearly 200 corpora in over 20 Asian languages, primarily in Chinese, Arabic, Japanese and Korean. These data sets are comprised of telephone speech, broadcast news and broadcast conversation, video keyframes, newswire, web collections and transcribed speech. To date, half of LDC’s 2010 publications are partly or primarily Asian language datasets, and we expect to release additional Chinese, Korean and Arabic corpora in the coming year. LDC anticipated these queries and in the months leading up to Interspeech, we prepared an Asian Spoken Language Sampler, LDC2010S07, which showcases some of these releases. The sampler is freely available for download here
Commercial Use of LDC Data LDC members and licensees are reminded that LDC data cannot be used for commercial purposes, except that commercial organizations may conduct research and commercial technology development with LDC data received when the organization was an LDC for-profit member unless use of that data is otherwise restricted by a corpus-specific user license. Not-for-profit members and non-members, including non-member commercial 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. To help further clarify commercial use of LDC data, consider the following two cases in which a commercial organization licenses LDC data. In the first case, a company has joined LDC as a For-Profit Member for the current year. As a member, this company will gain commercial rights to data from the year that they have joined unless otherwise restricted by a corpus-specific user license. Furthermore, while a member for the current year, the company can license data for commercial use from closed Membership Years at the Reduced Licensing Fee. If the company does not renew its membership for the following year, the company still retains ongoing commercial rights to data it licensed as a For-Profit member and any data from their Membership Year. This company will not have a commercial license to any new data obtained after their Membership Year has ended. In the second case, a company licenses data as a non-member. At this point, the company is not an LDC member and cannot use LDC data for any commercial purpose. If that company joins LDC in the future, that company will gain commercial rights to any data already licensed, unless those rights are otherwise restricted. A commercial organization can first license data as a non-member for research purposes and then join LDC to gain commercial rights to that data. LDC data users are also reminded to consult corpus-specific license agreements for limitations, including commercial restrictions, on the use of certain corpora. In the case of a small group of corpora that includes American National Corpus (ANC) Second Release (LDC2005T35), Buckwalter Arabic Morphological Analyzer Version 2.0 (LDC2004L02) and all CSLU corpora, commercial licenses must be obtained separately from the owners of the data. A full list of corpus-specific user licenses can be found on our License Agreements page.
Position Openings at LDC Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania has a number of immediate openings for full-time positions to support our corpus development projects: PROGRAMMER ANALYST - (#100528459 and #100929195) Support linguistic data collection and annotation projects by providing software development, system integration, technical and research support, annotation tool development and/or data collection system management.
SENIOR PROJECT MANAGER (#100728923 and #100728924) Provide complete oversight for multiple, concurrent corpus creation projects, including collection, annotation and distribution of speech, text and/or video data in a variety of languages. Create project roadmaps and direct teams of programmers, linguists and managers to execute deliverables; represent corpus creation efforts to external researchers and sponsors.
LEAD ANNOTATOR (#100728920) Perform linguistic annotation on English text, speech and video data; recruit, train and supervise teams of annotators for multiple tasks and languages; define, test and document procedural approaches to linguistic annotation;perform quality control on annotated data. For further information on the duties and qualifications for these positions, or to apply online please visit https://jobs.hr.upenn.edu/; search postings for the reference numbers indicated above. Penn offers an excellent benefits package including medical/dental, retirement plans, tuition assistance and a minimum of three weeks paid vacation per year. The University of Pennsylvania is an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer. All positions contingent upon grant funding. For more information about LDC and the programs we support, visit http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/.
New Publications (1) ACE Time Normalization (TERN) 2004 English Evaluation Data V1.0 was developed by researchers at The MITRE Corporation. It contains the English evaluation data prepared for the 2004 Time Expression Recognition and Normalization (TERN) Evaluation, sponsored by the Automatic Content Extraction (ACE) program, specifically, English broadcast news and newswire data collected by LDC. The training data for this evaluation can be found in ACE Time Normalization (TERN) 2004 English Training Data v 1.0 LDC2005T07. The purpose of the TERN evaluation is to advance the state of the art in the automatic recognition and normalization of natural language temporal expressions. In most language contexts such expressions are indexical. For example, with "Monday," "last week," or "three months starting October 1," one must know the narrative reference time in order to pinpoint the time interval being conveyed by the expression. In addition, for data exchange purposes, it is essential that the identified interval be rendered according to an established standard, i.e., normalized. Accurate identification and normalization of temporal expressions are in turn essential for the temporal reasoning being demanded by advanced NLP applications such as question answering, information extraction and summarization. The data in this release is English broadcast transcripts and newswire material from TDT4 Multilingual Text and Annotations LDC2005T16. The annotation specifications for this corpus were developed under DARPA's Translingual Information Detection Extraction and Summarization (TIDES) program, with support from ACE. All files have been doubly-annotated by two separate annotators and then reconciled, using the TIDES 2003 Standard for the Annotation of Temporal Expressions. The data directory contains the corpus which consists of 192 files (54K words). ACE Time Normalization (TERN) 2004 English Evaluation Data V1.0 is distributed via web download. 2010 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus on disc. 2010 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$1500.
(2) Korean Newswire Second Edition is an archive of Korean newswire text that has been acquired over several years (1994-2009) at LDC from the Korean Press Agency. This release includes all of the content of Korean Newswire (LDC2000T45) (June 1994-March 2000) as well as newly-collected data. The second edition contains all data collected by LDC from April 2000 through December 2009. All material, including that from the first release, has been converted to UTF-8 (except for more recent data already in UTF-8 format) and processed in LDC's gigaword format. The gigaword format classifies newswire content into three types: story, multi and other where "story" refers to an article containing information pertaining to a particular event on a day; "multi" refers to an article that contains more than one story relating to different topics; and "other" refers to articles containing lists, tables or numerical data, such as sports scores. A word break error in the original release and in data collected from January 2002 through February 2005 has been corrected in the second edition with the result that all Korean text should display correctly. The error involved a line break in the middle of a word with the result that an affected word appeared in segments in two lines. This problem was resolved using word histograms and a few common rules based on heuristics from the data and has yielded a 90% - 95% word break correction rate. Korean Newswire Second Edition is distributed on one CD-ROM. 2010 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2010 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$3000.
(3) NIST 2006 Open Machine Translation (OpenMT) Evaluation is a package containing source data, reference translations and scoring software used in the NIST 2006 OpenMT evaluation. It is designed to help evaluate the effectiveness of machine translation systems. The package was compiled and scoring software was developed by researchers at NIST, making use of broadcast, newswire and web newsgroup source data and reference translations collected and developed by LDC. The objective of the NIST Open Machine Translation (OpenMT) evaluation series is to support research in, and help advance the state of the art of, machine translation (MT) technologies -- technologies that translate text between human languages. Input may include all forms of text. The goal is for the output to be an adequate and fluent translation of the original. The OpenMT evaluations are intended to be of interest to all researchers working on the general problem of automatic translation between human languages. To this end, they are designed to be simple, to focus on core technology issues and to be fully supported. The 2006 task was to evaluate translation from Arabic to English and from Chinese to English. Additional information about these evaluations may be found at the NIST Open Machine Translation (OpenMT) Evaluation web site. This evaluation kit includes a single Perl script (mteval-v11b.pl) that may be used to produce a translation quality score for one (or more) MT systems. The script works by comparing the system output translation with a set of (expert) reference translations of the same source text. Comparison is based on finding sequences of words in the reference translations that match word sequences in the system output translation. The included scoring script was released with the original evaluation, intended for use with SGML-formatted data files, and is provided to ensure compatibility of user scoring results with results from the original evaluation. An updated scoring software package (mteval-v13a-20091001.tar.gz), with XML support, additional options and bug fixes, documentation, and example translations, may be downloaded from the NIST Multimodal Information Group Tools website. This release contains of 357 documents with corresponding sets of four separate human expert reference translations. The source data is comprised of Arabic and Chinese newswire documents, human transcriptions of broadcast news and broadcast conversation programs and web newsgroup documents collected by LDC in 2006. The newswire and broadcast material are from Agence France-Presse (Arabic, Chinese), Xinhua News Agency (Arabic, Chinese), Lebanese Broadcasting Corp. (Arabic), Dubai TV (Arabic), China Central TV (Chinese) and New Tang Dynasty Television (Chinese). The web text was collected from Google and Yahoo newsgroups. For each language, the test set consists of two files: a source and a reference file. Each reference file contains four independent translations of the data set. The evaluation year, source language, test set, version of the data, and source vs. reference file are reflected in the file name. NIST 2006 Open Machine Translation (OpenMT) Evaluation is distributed via web download. 2010 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus on disc. 2010 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$150. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ilya Ahtaridis Membership Coordinator -------------------------------------------------------------------- Linguistic Data Consortium Phone: 1 (215) 573-1275 University of Pennsylvania Fax: 1 (215) 573-2175 3600 Market St., Suite 810 ldc@ldc.upenn.edu Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA http://www.ldc.upenn.edu]]>http://www.luweixmu.com/home/default.asp?id=171