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<div align="center">The Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) is pleased to
announce the availability of three new publications.<br>
<br>
LDC2007S13<br>
- <b><a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2007S13">CSLU:
Apple Words and Phrases</a></b> -<br>
<br>
LDC2007T23<br>
- <b><a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2007T23">GALE
Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text - Part 1</a></b> -<br>
<br>
LDC2007S15<br>
- <b><a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2007S15">Nationwide
Speech Project</a></b> -<br>
</div>
<br>
<hr size="2" width="100%">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center"><b>New
Publications</b><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p>(1) <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2007S13">CSLU:
Apple Words and Phrases</a> contains approximately 69.5 hours of speech
from
3008 telephone calls placed on analog and digital phone systems. Apple
Computer, Inc. supported the development of this data and also supplied
the
list of words and phrases collected. Callers responded to questions
and
repeated a list of phrases as they were prompted. Each subject called
the
CSLU data collection system by dialing a toll-free number. The analog
data were collected via a Worldport Pod on an Apple Quadra A/V. The
digital data were collected with the CSLU T1 digital data collection
system.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p>Callers were prompted to answer certain questions including, What is
your
native language? In which city and state did you spend most of your
childhood?
What time is it now? What day is today? Callers were also instructed
to
repeat various command and control type phrases, including "play
previous
message again", "make a meeting for today", "quit",
"who is at work", "what is the area code for this state",
"hello, what are my messages", "help", "please send a
car from the city", "delete my email tomorrow", "read this
text", "erase all information", "record extended
phonebook", "transfer all calls to home at twelve o'clock",
"record urgent message" and "find the operator".<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;">Each recorded
utterance was listened to by a human verifier to
determine if
the speaker adequately followed the directions. If an utterance
contained
extraneous words or excessive noise, it was not included in the
corpus. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center"><b>*</b><o:p></o:p></p>
<p>(2) <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2007T23">GALE
Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text - Part 1</a> is the first
of the
three-part GALE Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text, which,
along with
other corpora, was used as training data in Year 1 (Phase 1) of the
DARPA-funded GALE program. This corpus contains transcripts and
English
translations of Chinese broadcast news programming. It does not
contain
the audio files from which the transcripts and translations were
generated. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p>A total of 23.3 hours of Chinese broadcast news programming was
selected
from two sources, China Central TV (CCTV) (a broadcaster from Mainland <st1:country-region><st1:place>China</st1:place></st1:country-region>)
and Phoenix TV (a Hong Kong-based satellite TV station). The
transcripts
and translations represent recordings of five different programs. A
manual selection procedure was used to choose data appropriate for the
GALE program,
namely, news programs focusing on current events. Stories on topics
such
as sports, entertainment news, and stock markets were excluded from the
data
set. <b> </b><o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="text-align: center;" align="center"><b>*</b><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">(3) The purpose of the <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2007S15">Nationwide
Speech Project</a> (NSP) was to collect a large
amount of speech produced by male and female talkers representing the
primary
regional varieties of American English: <st1:place>New England</st1:place>,
Mid-Atlantic, North, <st1:city><st1:place>Midland</st1:place></st1:city>,
South
and West. This release represents part of the work conducted by the
authors at Indiana University. It contains approximately 60 hours of
speech, nearly
one hour of speech from each of 60 white American English speakers
--including
five male and five female talkers from the six dialect regions --
reading words
and sentences. The corpus can be used for perceptual and acoustic
experiments
designed to explore the role of variation in spoken language
processing.
Such applications include speech science experiments and
sociolinguistic or
sociophonetic research. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p>The speakers were recruited from the Indiana University community;
they were
all 18-25 years old at the time of recording, had lived exclusively in
one
region prior to age 18, and both parents of each speaker were also
raised in
the same region. Further demographic information about the speakers is
provided. The materials include 102 high predictability sentences and
five repetitions of each of 10 hVd words. The high predictability
sentences are 5-8 words in length and the final word in each sentence
is highly
predictable based on the preceding semantic context. The 10 hVd
words are: heed, hid, hayed, head, had, hod, hud, hoes, hood and
who'd. <br>
</p>
<br>
<hr size="2" width="100%"><br>
<div align="center"><small><font face="Courier New, Courier, monospace">Ilya
Ahtaridis</font></small><br>
<small><font face="Courier New, Courier, monospace">Membership
Coordinator</font></small><br>
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<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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