<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">------------------------------------------------------------------------</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Arabic-L: Mon 20 Mar 2008</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <<a href="mailto:dilworth_parkinson@byu.edu">dilworth_parkinson@byu.edu</a>></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">[To post messages to the list, send them to <a href="mailto:arabic-l@byu.edu">arabic-l@byu.edu</a>]</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">[To unsubscribe, send message from same address you subscribed from to</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><a href="mailto:listserv@byu.edu">listserv@byu.edu</a> with first line reading:</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "> unsubscribe arabic-l ]</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">-------------------------Directory------------------------------------</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">1) Subject:New LDC resources</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">-------------------------Messages-----------------------------------</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">1)</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Date: 20 Mar 2008</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">From:<a href="mailto:ldc@ldc.upenn.edu">ldc@ldc.upenn.edu</a></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Subject:New LDC resources</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><p> <a href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2008T02">GALE Phase 1 Arabic Blog Parallel Text</a> was prepared by the LDC and consists of 102K words (222 files) of Arabic blog text and its English translation from thirty-three sources. This release was used as training data in Phase 1 of the DARPA-funded GALE program.</p><p>The task of preparing this corpus involved four stages of work: data scouting, data harvesting, formatting, and data selection.</p>Data scouting involved manually searching the web for suitable blog text. Data scouts were assigned particular topics and genres along with a production target in order to focus their web search. Formal annotation guidelines and a customized annotation toolkit helped data scouts to manage the search process and to track progress.<p>Data scouts logged their decisions about potential text of interest (sites, threads and posts) to a database. A nightly process queried the annotation database and harvested all designated URLs. Whenever possible, the entire site was downloaded, not just the individual thread or post located by the data scout.</p><p>Once the text was downloaded, its format was standardized so that the data could be more easily integrated into downstream annotation processes. Typically a new script was required for each new domain name that was identified. After scripts were run, an optional manual process corrected any remaining formatting problems.</p><p>The selected documents were then reviewed for content suitability using a semi-automatic process. A statistical approach was used to rank a document's relevance to a set of already-selected documents labeled as "good." An annotator then reviewed the list of relevance-ranked documents and selected those which were suitable for a particular annotation task or for annotation in general. <br></p><p>After files were selected, they were reformatted into a human-readable translation format, and the files were then assigned to professional translators for careful translation. Translators followed LDC's GALE Translation guidelines, which describe the makeup of the translation team, the source, data format, the translation data format, best practices for translating certain linguistic features (such as names and speech disfluencies), and quality control procedures applied to completed translations.</p><p>All final data are in Tab Delimited Format (TDF). TDF is compatible with other transcription formats, such as the Transcriber format and AG format, and it is easy to process. Each line of a TDF file corresponds to a speech segment and contains 13 tab delimited field.A source TDF file and its translation are the same except that the transcript in the source TDF is replaced by its English translation. GALE Phase 1 Arabic Blog Parallel Text is distributed via web download.<b><br></b></p>2008 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus on disc. 2008 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Nonmembers may license this data for US$1500</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">--------------------------------------------------------------------------</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">End of Arabic-L: 20 Mar 2008</div></div></div></body></html>