[Corpora-List] LDC News - March 2011

Linguistic Data Consortium ldc at ldc.upenn.edu
Tue Mar 22 17:54:59 UTC 2011


/In this newsletter:/**
**
**- *Spring 2011 LDC Data Scholarship Recipients*   - <#scholar>

*****- LDC at NEALLT 2011 <#nea>**-*****
**
/New publications:/**
**
***- * *2008/2010 NIST Metrics for Machine Translation (MetricsMaTr) 
GALE Evaluation Set* <#matr>*   -*****
**
*****- NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program  -- Meeting 
Data Training Set Part 1 <#vace>**   -*****
*****
*
------------------------------------------------------------------------

*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 /Speech in Noisy Environments
    (SPINE2) Part 1 Audio/ and /Transcripts/ (LDC2001S04 and LDC2001T05)
    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 Phase I (LDC98S75) /and/2003 NIST Spearker Recognition
    Evaluation (LDC2010S03)/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 classifying
    emotions based on features in 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-1 Release
    2 (LDC97S62) /and/2002 NIST Spearker Recognition Evaluation
    (LDC2004S04)/// //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 
<http://neallt.org/> 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 
<http://projects.ldc.upenn.edu/art/>, designed to support the 
development of reading skills for learning Arabic as a first and second 
language.


*New Publications*
**
*
***(1) 2008/2010 NIST Metrics for Machine Translation (MetricsMaTr) GALE 
Evaluation Set (LDC2011T05) 
<http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=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 
<http://projects.ldc.upenn.edu/gale/index.html>program.

NIST MetricsMaTr <http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/mig/tests/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 
<http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/mig/tests/metricsmatr/2008/>; the 
development data from the 2008 program is available from LDC, 2008 NIST 
Metrics for Machine Translation (MetricsMATR08) Development Data 
LDC2009T05 
<http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2009T05>. The 
MetricsMaTr10 evaluation plan 
<https://secure.ldc.upenn.edu/intranet/docs/NISTMetricsMaTr10EvalPlan.pdf> 
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).



** *


(2) NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program  -- Meeting Data 
Training Set Part 1 (LDC2011V01) 
<http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2011V01> 
was developed by researchers at the Department of Computer Science and 
Engineering <http://www.cse.usf.edu/>, University of South Florida 
(USF), Tampa, Florida and the Multimodal Information Group 
<http://nist.gov/itl/iad/mig/> 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.


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

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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