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<div align="center">LDC2008L01<br>
<b>- <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2008L01">An
English Dictionary of the Tamil Verb</a> -</b><br>
<br>
LDC2008T06<br>
<b>- <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2008T06">GALE
Phase 1 Chinese Blog Parallel Text</a> -</b><br>
<br>
The Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC)
would like to announce the
availability of two new publications.<br>
</div>
<b><br>
</b>
<hr size="2" width="100%"><b><br>
</b><br>
<div align="center"><b>New Publications</b><br>
</div>
<b><br>
</b>
<p><strong></strong>(1) <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2008L01">An
English Dictionary of the Tamil Verb</a> represents
over twenty-five years of work led by Harold F. Schiffman, Professor,
emeritus, of Dravidian Lingusitics and Culture at the University of
Pennsylvania's Department of South Asia Studies. It contains
translations for 6597 English verbs and defines 9716 Tamil verbs. This
release presents the dictionary in two formats: Adobe PDF and XML. The
PDF format displays the dictionary in a human readable form and is
suitable for printing. The XML version is a purely electronic form
intended mainly for application
development and the creation of searchable electronic databases. <br>
</p>
<p>In the
electronic XML version each entry contains the following: the English
entry or head word; the Tamil equivalent (in Tamil script and
transliteration); the verb class and transitivity specification; the
spoken Tamil pronunciation (audio files in mp3 format); the English
definition(s); additional Tamil entries (if applicable); example
sentences or phrases in Literary Tamil, Spoken Tamil (with a
corresponding audio file in .mp3 format) and an English translation;
and Tamil synonyms or near-synonyms, where appropriate. It is expected
that the
dictionary will be useful for Tamil learners, scholars and others
interested in the Tamil language. </p>
<p>An English Dictionary of the Tamil Verb seeks to meet needs not
currently addressed by existing English-Tamil dictionaries. The main
goal of this dictionary is to get an English-knowing user to a Tamil
verb, irrespective of whether he or she begins with an English verb or
some other item, such as an adjective; this is because what may be a
verb in Tamil may in fact not be a verb in English, and vice versa.
Since the number of English entries is limited (slightly less than
10,000) there may not be main entries for certain low-frequency items
like 'pounce' but this item does appear as a synonym for 'jump, leap',
and some other verbs, so searching for 'pounce' will get the user to a
Tamil verb via the synonym field. The main goal is therefore to
specifically concentrate on supplying the kinds of information lacking
in all previous attempts to capture the equivalencies between English
and Tamil. <br>
</p>
<br>
<br>
<div align="center"><b>*</b><br>
</div>
<br>
<div align="left">(2) <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2008T06">GALE
Phase 1 Chinese Blog Parallel Text</a> was prepared by the LDC and
consists of 313K characters (277 files) of Chinese blog text and its
translation selected from eight sources. This release was used as
training data in Phase 1 of the DARPA-funded GALE program. </div>
<p align="left">The task of preparing this corpus involved four stages
of work: data
scouting, data harvesting, formatting, and data selection.</p>
<div align="left">Data scouting involved manually searching the web for
suitable blog
text. Data scouts were assigned particular topics and genres along with
a production target in order to focus their web search. Formal
annotation guidelines and a customized annotation toolkit helped data
scouts to manage the search process and to track progress.
</div>
<p align="left">Data scouts logged their decisions about potential text
of interest
(sites, threads and posts) to a database. A nightly process queried the
annotation database and harvested all designated URLs. Whenever
possible, the entire site was downloaded, not just the individual
thread or post located by the data scout. </p>
<p align="left">Once the text was downloaded, its format was
standardized so that
the data could be more easily integrated into downstream annotation
processes. Typically a new script was required for each new domain name
that was identified. After scripts were run, an optional manual process
corrected any remaining formatting problems.</p>
<p align="left">The selected documents were then reviewed for content
suitability
using a semi-automatic process. A statistical approach was used to rank
a document's relevance to a set of already-selected documents labeled
as "good." An annotator then reviewed the list of relevance-ranked
documents and selected those which were suitable for a particular
annotation task or for annotation in general. <br>
</p>
<p>Manual sentence units/segments (SU) annotation was also performed on
a subset of files following LDC's Quick Rich Transcription
specification. Three types of end of sentence SU were identified:
statement SU, question SU, and incomplete SU. </p>
<p align="left">After files were selected, they were reformatted into a
human-readable translation format, and the files were then assigned to
professional translators for careful translation. Translators followed
LDC's GALE Translation guidelines, which describe the makeup of the
translation team, the source, data format, the translation data format,
best practices for translating certain linguistic features (such as
names and speech disfluencies), and quality control procedures applied
to completed translations. <br>
</p>
<br>
<br>
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face="Courier New, Courier, monospace">
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<div align="center"><font face="Courier New, Courier, monospace"><small><small><big>Ilya
Ahtaridis<br>
Membership Coordinator</big><br>
<br>
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</small></font></div>
<div align="center">
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72"><font
face="Courier New, Courier, monospace">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></font></pre>
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