[Corpora-List] News from LDC

Thu Dec 22 19:54:21 UTC 2011

/In this newsletter:/

*- Spring 2012 LDC Data Scholarship Program - deadline approaching! 
<#scholar>  -*

*- **LDC Exhibiting at LSA 2012 Annual Meeting <#lsa>**  -
*

*- **LDC Hosts Satellite Workshop at LSA 2012 <#workshop>  -*

/New publications:/

LDC2011S10
*- **2006 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set Part 1 <#2006>**  -
*

LDC2011S11
*- 2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Supplemental Set <#2008>  -*

------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Spring 2012 LDC Data Scholarship Program - deadline fast approaching!*

The deadline for the Spring 2012 LDC Data Scholarship Program is less 
than a month away!   Applications are being accepted through January 15, 
2012.  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 <http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/About/scholarships.html> 
page.

Students can email their applications to the LDC Data Scholarship 
program <mailto:datascholarships at ldc.upenn.edu>. Decisions will be sent 
by email from the same address.

*LDC Exhibiting at LSA 2012 Annual Meeting*

LDC looks forward to mingling with linguists and language specialists 
when we exhibit at the 86^th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of 
America (LSA). The main conference will be held over January 5-8, 2012 
at the Portland, OR Hilton and Executive Tower 
<http://www.tourhiltonportland.com/> and the exhibit hall will be open 
from January 6-8th (limited hours on Sunday the 8^th ). Please stop by 
our display for news on what 2012 will hold for LDC and to receive some 
of our conference giveaways.

LSA 2012 will feature plenary talks on the following topics:

        *          Patrice Speeter Beddor (University of Michigan): "The
          Dynamics of Speech Perception: Constancy, Variation, and Change"

        *           Dan Jurafsky (Stanford University): "Computing
          Meaning: Learning and Extracting Meaning from Text"

        *          Ted Supalla (University of Rochester): "Rethinking
          the Emergence of Grammatical Structure in Signed Languages:
          New Evidence from Variation and Historical Change in American
          Sign Language"

For further information visit the LSA Annual Meeting website 
<http://www.lsadc.org/info/meet-annual.cfm>. If you would like to learn 
more about LDC's conference preparations, please 'like' our Facebook 
<http://www.facebook.com/ldc.upenn> page.

We hope to see you there!

**

*New Publications

*

(1) 2006 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set Part 1 
<http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2011S10> 
was developed by LDC and National Institute of Standards and Technology 
(NIST).  It contains 437 hours of conversational telephone and 
microphone speech in English, Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Farsi, Hindi, 
Korean, Russian, Spanish, Thai and Urdu and associated English 
transcripts used as test data in the NIST-sponsored2006 Speaker 
Recognition Evaluation (SRE) 
<http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/mig/tests/spk/2006/index.html>.

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 
<http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/mig/tests/spk/2006/index.html> and within 
the 2006 SRE Evaluation Plan 
<https://secure.ldc.upenn.edu/intranet/docs/LDC2011S10/sre-06_evalplan-v9.pdf>.

The speech data in this release was collected by LDC as part of the 
Mixer <http://projects.ldc.upenn.edu/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 Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Farsi, Hindi, Korean, 
Russian, Spanish, Thai and Urdu.

The telephone speech segments are multi-channel data collected 
simultaneously from a number of auxiliary microphones. The files are 
organized into four types: two-channel excerpts of approximately 10 
seconds, two-channel conversations of approximately 5 minutes, 
summed-channel conversations also of approximately 5 minutes and a 
two-channel conversation with the usual telephone speech replaced by 
auxiliary microphone data in the putative target speaker channel. The 
auxiliary microphone conversations are also of approximately five 
minutes in length.

English language transcripts in .ctm format were produced using an 
automatic speech recognition (ASR) system.

***

(2) 2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Supplemental Set 
<http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2011S11> 
was developed by LDC and National Institute of Standards and Technology 
(NIST) and contains additional data distributed after the main 2008 
Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE). Specifically, the corpus consists 
of 770 hours of English microphone speech along with transcripts and 
other materials used as supplemental data in the 2008 NIST Speaker 
Recognition Evaluation (SRE) 
<http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/mig/tests/spk/2008/index.html> and in a 
follow-up evaluation to SRE08.

The 2008 evaluation was distinguished from prior evaluations 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 follow-up 
evaluation focused on speaker detection in the context of conversational 
interview type speech and was designed to measure the performance of 
SRE08 systems in previously unexposed test segment channel conditions.

LDC previously released the main 2008 NIST SRE Evaluation in three parts 
as 2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Set Part 1 
LDC2011S05 
<http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2011S05>, 2008 
NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Set Part 2 LDC2011S07 
<http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2011S07> 
and 2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set LDC2011S08 
<http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2011S08>.

The speech data in this release was collected in 2007 by LDC at its 
Human Subjects Data Collection Laboratories 
<http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/About/facilities.shtml> in Philadelphia and by 
the International Computer Science Institute 
<http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/> (ICSI) at the University of California, 
Berkeley. This collection was part of the Mixer 5 
<http://projects.ldc.upenn.edu/Mixer/> 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 
microphone speech in this corpus is in English and consists of 
approximately 3 minute and 30 minute interview excerpts.

This supplemental data is split into four different parts which provide:

    * new training data distributed to 2008 SRE participants
    * additional data distributed to participants in the 2008 SRE
      follow-up evaluation
    * interviewer channel files for the 2008 SRE main test (released
      after the evaluations)
    * supplemental training data (released after the evaluations)

English language transcripts in .cfm format were produced using an 
automatic speech recognition (ASR) system and are included for some, but 
not all, speech data.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ilya Ahtaridis
Membership Coordinator
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Linguistic Data Consortium                  Phone: 1 (215) 573-1275
University of Pennsylvania                    Fax: 1 (215) 573-2175
3600 Market St., Suite 810ldc at ldc.upenn.edu
Philadelphia, PA 19104 USAhttp://www.ldc.upenn.edu

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