[Corpora-List] News from LDC

Linguistic Data Consortium ldc at ldc.upenn.edu
Wed Nov 23 18:46:23 UTC 2011


/In this newsletter:/*
*

*Spring 2012 LDC Data Scholarship Program* <#scholar>

*Invitation to Join for Membership Year (MY) 2012* <#my>

    /New publications:/

*2006 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Set* <#sre>

*2006 NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program - Meeting Data 
Test Set Part 2* <#vace>

*Chinese Gigaword Fifth Edition* <#gig>

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

*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 
<http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/index.jsp> 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 
<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.

The deadline for the Spring 2012 program cycle is January 15, 2012.


*Invitation to join for Membership Year (MY) 2012*


Membership Year (MY) 2012, our 20th Anniversary Year, is open for 
joining!  We would like to invite all current and previous members of 
LDC to renew their membership as well as welcome new organizations to 
join the consortium.   For MY2012, LDC is pleased to maintain membership 
fees at last year's rates -- membership fees will not increase.  
Additionally, 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 MY2012 are as follows:

·Organizations who joined for MY2011 will receive a 5% discount when 
renewing. This discount will apply throughout 2012, regardless of time 
of renewal. MY2011 members renewing before March 1, 2012 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 MY2011, but 
who held membership in any of the previous MYs (1993-2010), will also be 
eligible for a 5% discount provided that they join/renew before March 1, 
2012.

The following table provides exact pricing information.

	

*MY2012 Fee *

	

*MY2012 Fee
with 5% Discount* *

	

*MY2012 Fee
with 10% Discount** *

*Not-for-Profit/US Government *

	

	

	

	

Standard

	

US$2400

	

US$2280

	

US$2160

	

Subscription

	

US$3850

	

US$3658

	

US$3465

*For-Profit *

	

	

	

	

Standard

	

US$24000

	

US$22800

	

US$21600

	

Subscription

	

US$27500

	

US$26125

	

US$24750


*  For new members, MY2011 Members renewing for MY2012, and any previous 
year Member who renews before March 1, 2012

** For MY2011 Members renewing before March 1, 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.

*New Publications*

(1) 2006 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Set 
<http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2011S09> 
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-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/LDC2011S09/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 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.


*

(2) 2006 NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program - Meeting 
Data Test Set Part 2 
<http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2011V06> 
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 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) 
<http://gps-tsc.upc.es/imatge/_JosepRamon/CHIL/CHIL.html> collaborated 
to hold the Classification of Events, Activities and Relationships 
(CLEAR) Evaluation <http://clear-evaluation.org/clear06/>. 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 
<http://www.kit.edu/english/index.php>, 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).


*

(3) Chinese Gigaword Fifth Edition 
<http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2011T13> 
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 
<http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=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.


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

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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