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<div align="center">The Linguistic Data
Consortium (LDC) would like to announce the availability of three new
publications.<b><br>
</b><br>
LDC2007S08<br>
<a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2007S08"><b>-CSLU:Foreign
Accented English Release 1.2-</b></a><br>
<br>
LDC2007T07<br>
<a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2007T07"><b>-English
Gigaword Third Edition-</b></a><br>
<br>
LDC2007T21<br>
</div>
<div align="center"><a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2007T21"><b>-OntoNotes
v 1.0-</b></a><br>
<br>
<hr size="2" width="100%"></div>
<div align="center"><b><br>
New Publications </b><br>
</div>
<div align="center"><b><br>
</b>
<div align="left">(1)<b> </b><a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2007S08">CSLU:
Foreign Accented English Release 1.2</a> consists of continuous speech
in English by native speakers of 22 different languages: Arabic,
Cantonese, Czech, Farsi, French, German, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian,
Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Malay, Polish, Portuguese
(Brazilian and Iberian), Russian, Swedish, Spanish, Swahili, Tamil and
Vietnamese. The corpus contains 4925 telephone-quality utterances, as
well as information about the speakers' linguistic backgrounds and
perceptual judgments about the accents in the utterances. <br>
</div>
</div>
<p>For this collection, the speakers were asked to speak about
themselves in English for 20 seconds. Three native speakers of American
English independently listened to each utterance and judged the
speakers' accents on a 4-point scale: negligible/no accent, mild
accent, strong accent and very strong accent. CSLU: Foreign Accented
English Release 1.2 corpus is intended to support the study of the
underlying
characteristics of foreign accent and to enable research, development
and evaluation of algorithms for the identification and understanding
of accented speech. Some of the files in this corpus are also contained
in CSLU: 22 Languages Corpus, LDC2005S26. <br>
</p>
<div align="center">*<br>
</div>
<p>(2) <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2007T07">English
Gigaword Third Edition</a> is a comprehensive archive of newswire text
data that has been acquired over several years by the LDC. This
edition includes all of the contents in the second edition
(LDC2005T12) as well as new data from the same five sources presented
there covering 24-month period of January 2005 through December 2006.
Also, a sixth data source (the Los Angeles Times/Washington Post
newswire service) has been added in the third edition. <br>
<br>
The six distinct international sources of English newswire included in
this edition are the following: <br>
</p>
<ul>
<li>Agence France-Presse, English Service (afp_eng) </li>
<li>Associated Press Worldstream, English Service (apw_eng) </li>
<li>Central News Agency of Taiwan, English Service (cna_eng) </li>
<li>Los Angeles Times/Washington Post Newswire Service (ltw_eng) </li>
<li>New York Times Newswire Service (nyt_eng) </li>
<li>Xinhua News Agency, English Service (xin_eng)<br>
</li>
</ul>
<p>As with other Gigaword releases, some of the content in the this
corpus has been published previously by the LDC in a variety of other
corpora, particularly the North American News text corpora, the
various TDT corpora, and the AQUAINT text corpus, as well as earlier
editions of English Gigaword. <br>
</p>
<p align="center">*<br>
</p>
<p>(3) The OntoNotes project is a collaborative effort between BBN
Technologies, the University of Colorado, the University of
Pennsylvania, and the University of Southern California's Information
Sciences Institute. It aims to annotate a large corpus comprising
various genres of text (news, conversational telephone speech, weblogs,
use net, broadcast, talk shows) in three languages (English, Chinese,
and Arabic) with structural information (syntax and predicate argument
structure) and shallow semantics (word sense linked to an ontology and
coreference). OntoNotes builds on two time-tested resources, following
the Penn Treebank for syntax and the Penn PropBank for
predicate-argument structure. Its semantic representation includes word
sense disambiguation for nouns and verbs, with each word sense
connected to an ontology, and coreference. The goals call for
annotation of over a million words each of English and Chinese, and
half a million words of Arabic over five years. <br>
</p>
<p>The current release, <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2007T21">OntoNotes
v 1.0</a>, contains over 300K words of
annotated English data drawn from the LDC95T7 Treebank-2 Wall Street
Journal corpus and 250K words of annotated Chinese data drawn from
Xinhua News Agency and Sinorama Magazine<br>
</p>
<p>The normative version of OntoNotes v 1.0 is a relational database,
for which the various layers of annotation for both the English and
Chinese corpora are merged. It was created by loading the separate
Treebank, PropBank, word sense, and coreference sources and merging
them into a set of linked relational database tables. The source files
for each of the five layers of annotation (syntactic structure,
propositional structure, word sense, coreference, and names) are
included in the data
directory, using separate files for each layer of annotation of each
corpus document files. <br>
</p>
<br>
<hr size="2" width="100%">
<div align="center"><small><font face="Courier New, Courier, monospace"><br>
Ilya
Ahtaridis<br>
Membership Coordinator</font></small><br>
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<div align="center">
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72"><b><small><font
face="Courier New, Courier, monospace">
</font></small>Linguistic Data Consortium Phone: (215) 573-1275
University of Pennsylvania Fax: (215) 573-2175
3600 Market St., Suite 810 <a
class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:ldc@ldc.upenn.edu">ldc@ldc.upenn.edu</a>
Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA <a
class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu">http://www.ldc.upenn.edu</a></b></pre>
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