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<p align="center"><b>- Release of Additional NomBank Files -</b></p>
<p align="center"><b>- Switchboard Dialog Act Corpus Now Available -</b><br>
</p>
<div align="center">LDC2008T17<br>
<b>- <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2008T17">CALLHOME
Mandarin Chinese Transcripts - XML version</a> -</b><br>
</div>
<p align="center">
LDC2008S07<b><br>
- <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2008S07">CSLU:
ISOLET Spoken Letter Database Version 1.3</a> -<br>
</b></p>
<div align="center">LDC2008T18<br>
<b>
- <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2008T18">GALE
Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text - Part 3</a> -<br>
<br>
<br>
</b>
<hr size="2" width="100%"></div>
<b>
<br>
</b>
<p style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: center;" align="center"><b>Release
of
Additional NomBank Files</b><o:p></o:p></p>
<p>NomBank is an annotation project at New York University which
provides
argument structure for instances of common nouns in <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC95T7">Treebank-2
(LDC95T7) </a><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span>and <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC99T42">Treebank-3
(LDC99T42)</a>, also known as the 'Penn Treebanks'. Last December, the
project released NomBank.1.0 which covers all the "markable" nouns in
the Wall Street Journal material in <span style=""></span>the
Penn Treebanks. That release included a total of 114,576 propositions
derived from looking at a total of 202,965 noun instances and choosing
only those nouns whose arguments occur in the text. NomBank and
related
resources are available from the <a
href="http://nlp.cs.nyu.edu/meyers/NomBank.html">NomBank</a> project
website.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p>The LDC is now making available additional NomBank data which have
been restricted due to licensing arrangements with their owners. Those
files are as follows:<o:p></o:p></p>
<ul type="disc">
<li class="MsoNormal" style=""><b><a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2008T23">NomBank
v 1.0 (LDC2008T23)</a></b><o:p></o:p></li>
<ul type="circle">
<li class="MsoNormal" style="">a complete printout of NomBank in
human-readable form. <o:p></o:p></li>
</ul>
</ul>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;">
A license to either <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC95T7">Treebank-2
(LDC95T7) </a>or <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC99T42">Treebank-3
(LDC99T42) </a><span style=""> </span>is required to obtain
NomBank v1.0.<o:p></o:p></p>
<ul type="disc">
<li class="MsoNormal" style=""><a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2008T24"><b>COMNOM
v 1.0 (LDC2008T24)</b></a><o:p></o:p></li>
<ul type="circle">
<li class="MsoNormal" style="">COMNOM is created by automatically
adding classes to COMLEX Syntax on the basis of NOMLEX-PLUS. For
details, please see the document entitled "<a
href="http://nlp.cs.nyu.edu/meyers/nombank/those-other-nombank-dictionaries.pdf">Those
Other NomBank Dictionaries</a>". <o:p></o:p></li>
</ul>
</ul>
<blockquote>
<p class="MsoNormal">A license to <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC98L21">COMLEX
English Syntax Lexicon (LDC98L21)</a> or <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC96T11">COMLEX
Syntax Text Corpus Version 2.0 (LDC96T11)</a> is required to obtain
COMNOM v 1.0.<o:p></o:p></p>
</blockquote>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> <br>
</o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;">All requests for
these files can be directed to <a href="mailto:ldc@ldc.upenn.edu">ldc@ldc.upenn.edu</a><br>
<br style="">
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br style="">
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: center;"
align="center"><b>Switchboard
Dialog Act Corpus Now Available<br style="">
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br style="">
<!--[endif]--></b><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;">
The Switchboard Dialog Act Corpus is a version of the <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC97S62">Switchboard-1
Release 2</a>
corpus of telephone conversations tagged with a shallow discourse
tagset of approximately 60 basic dialog act tags and combinations.<span
style=""> </span>The
discourse tag-set used is an augmentation of the Discourse Annotation
and Markup System of Labeling (DAMSL) tag-set, and is referred to as
the 'SWBD-DAMSL' labels. These annotations were created in 1997 at the
University of Colorado at Boulder, with the goal of building better
language models for automatic speech recognition of the Switchboard
domain. To that end the label-set incorporates both traditional
sociolinguistic and discourse-theoretic rhetorical
relations/adjacency-pairs as well as some more-form-based labels. The
Switchboard Dialog Act Corpus contains labels for 1155 5-minute
conversations, comprising 205,000 utterances and 1.4 million words. <br>
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;">To
download this corpus from our ftp server, please visit the LDC catalog
page for <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC97S62">Switchboard-1
Release 2</a> and scroll down to the section entitled 'Updates'.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><br>
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><br>
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: center;" align="center"><b>New
Publications</b></p>
<p>(1) LDC's CALLHOME Mandarin Chinese collection includes telephone
speech,
associated transcripts and a lexicon. <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC96S34">CALLHOME
Mandarin Chinese Speech</a> consists of 120 unscripted telephone
conversations
between native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. All calls, which lasted up
to
thirty minutes, originated in <st1:place>North America</st1:place> and
were
placed to locations overseas; most participants called family members
or close
friends. <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC96T16">CALLHOME
Mandarin Chinese Transcripts</a> covers a contiguous five or ten-minute
segment
from each of the telephone speech files. The transcripts are in
tab-delimited
format with GB2312 encoding, are timestamped by speaker turn for
alignment with
the speech signal and are provided in standard orthography. <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC96T16">CALLHOME
Mandarin Chinese Lexicon</a> is comprised of over 40,000 words from
twenty
CALLHOME Mandarin transcripts. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p><a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2008T17">C</a><a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2008T17">ALLHOME
Mandarin Chinese Transcripts - XML Version</a>, the latest addition to
this
collection, was created by Lancaster University and presents the entire
original corpus of 120 transcripts in XML format with UTF-8 encoding,
retokenization and part-of-speech (POS) tagging. The retokenization and
POS
information were supplied using the Chinese Lexical Analysis System
(ICTCLAS)
developed by the <a href="http://www.ict.ac.cn/english/">Institute of
Computing
Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences</a>, <st1:city><st1:place>Beijing</st1:place></st1:city>.
ICTCLAS aims to incorporate Chinese word segmentation, POS tagging,
disambiguation and unknown words recognition into a single theoretical
framework using multi-layered hierarchical hidden Markov models. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p>In addition to the original applications for Mandarin Chinese
CALLHOME data
(e.g., speech recognition), CALLHOME Mandarin Chinese Transcripts - XML
Version
will be useful in the grammatical study of spoken Mandarin. This XML
corpus retains all of the linguistic analyses (e.g., timestamps, spoken
features and proper nouns) from the original transcripts release, but
the
mnemonics used in the original release were migrated into XML markup. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">All analyses in the original release were retained
at the sacrifice
of
tokenization and part-of-speech tagging accuracy (e.g., some mnemonics
encoding
spoken features may split a word, which can affect the tagging
accuracy).
However, the results of the automated processing were substantially
post-edited. In addition, a large number of obvious typographical
errors
in the original release were corrected in the process of post-editing.
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center"><b>*<br>
<br>
</b></p>
<p>(2) <span style="color: rgb(51, 102, 255);"><a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2008S07">CSLU:
ISOLET Spoken Letter Database Version 1.3</a></span> was created by the
Center
for Spoken Language Understanding (CSLU) at OGI School of Science and
Engineering, Oregon Health and <st1:place><st1:placename>Science</st1:placename>
<st1:placetype>University</st1:placetype></st1:place>, <st1:place><st1:city>Beaverton</st1:city>,
<st1:state>Oregon</st1:state></st1:place>. CSLU: <span
style="color: black;">ISOLET Spoken Letter Database Version 1.3</span>
is a database of
letters of the English alphabet spoken in isolation under quiet
laboratory
conditions and associated transcripts. The data was collected in 1990
and
consists of two productions of each letter by 150 speakers (7800 spoken
letters) for approximately 1.25 hours of speech. The subjects consisted
of 75
male speakers and 75 female speakers; all speakers reported English as
their
native language. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p>Speech was recorded in the OGI speech recognition laboratory and the
recording equipment was selected to mimic the equipment used to collect
the <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC93S1">TIMIT</a>
database as closely as possible. The speech was recorded with a
Sennheiser HMD
224 noise-canceling microphone, low pass filtered at 7.6 kHz. Data
capture was
performed using the AT&T DSP32 board installed in a Sun 4/110. The
data
were sampled at 16 kHz and converted to RIFF(.WAV) format.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p>The transcriptions of the recorded speech are time-aligned phonetic
transcriptions conforming to the CSLU Labeling standards. Time-aligned
word
transcriptions are represented in a standard orthography or
romanization.
Speech and non-speech phenomena are distinguished. The transcriptions
are
aligned to a waveform by placing boundaries to mark the beginning and
ending of
words. In addition to the specification of boundaries, this level of
transcription includes additional commentary on salient speech and
non-speech
characteristics, such as glottalization, inhalation, and exhalation. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center"><b>*<br>
</b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center"><br>
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p>(3) <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2008T18">GALE
Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text - Part 3</a> contains
transcripts
and English translations of 19.1 hours of Chinese broadcast news
programming
from Voice of America (VOA), China Central TV (CCTV) and Phoenix TV. It
does
not contain the audio files from which the transcripts and translations
were
generated. GALE Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text - Part 3
is the
last 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. LDC has previously released <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2007T23">GALE
Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text - Part 1</a> and <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2008T08">GALE
Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text - Part 2</a>.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p>A total of 19.1 hours of Chinese broadcast news recordings were
selected
from three sources: VOA, <span style=""> </span>CCTV (a
broadcaster from Mainland China) and Phoenix TV (a Hong Kong-based
satellite TV
station). 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 and business
were
excluded from the data set. 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. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p>After transcription and SU annotation, 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>
<hr size="2" width="100%">
<div align="center"><font face="Courier New, Courier, monospace"><small><small><big><br>
Ilya
Ahtaridis</big></small></small></font><br>
<font face="Courier New, Courier, monospace"><small><small><big>
Membership Coordinator</big></small></small></font><br>
<font face="Courier New, Courier, monospace"><small><small>
</small></small></font><br>
<font face="Courier New, Courier, monospace"><small><small>
</small>--------------------------------------------------------------------</small></font><br>
<font face="Courier New, Courier, monospace"><small>
</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>
</div>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">
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