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<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center"><i>New
Publications:<br>
</i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center">LDC2010S01<b><br>
</b><a href="#speech">-
<b>Fisher
Spanish Speech</b> -</a><br>
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center">LDC2010T04<b><br>
<a href="#transcripts">-
Fisher
Spanish - Transcripts -</a></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center"><i>Other
news:</i><br>
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center"><a
href="#65"><b>- 65,000th LDC Corpus Distributed! -</b></a></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center"><a
href="#pipeline"><b>-
2010
Publications Pipeline -</b></a></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center"><a
href="imap://ldc@mail.ldc.upenn.edu:993/fetch%3EUID%3E/INBOX%3E753331#pipeline"><b></b></a></p>
<hr size="2" width="100%">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center"><br>
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: center;"
align="center"><b>New
Publications</b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: center;"
align="center"><br>
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p><a name="speech">(1) </a><a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2010S01">Fisher
Spanish Speech</a> was developed by LDC and consists of audio files
covering
roughly 163 hours of telephone speech from 136 native Caribbean Spanish
and
non-Caribbean Spanish speakers. Full orthographic transcripts of these
audio
files are available in <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2010T04">Fisher
Spanish - Transcripts (LDC2010T04)</a>. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p>The Fisher telephone conversation collection protocol was created at
LDC to
address a critical need of developers trying to build robust automatic
speech
recognition (<st1:stockticker>ASR</st1:stockticker>) systems. Under the
Fisher
protocol, a very large number of participants each make a few calls of
short
duration speaking to other participants, whom they typically do not
know, about
assigned topics. This maximizes inter-speaker variation and vocabulary
breadth
although it also increases formality. Previous protocols such as
CALLHOME, CALLFRIEND and Switchboard relied upon participant activity
to drive
the collection. Fisher is unique in being platform driven rather than
participant driven. Participants who wish to initiate a call may do so;
however
the collection platform initiates the majority of calls. Participants
need only
answer their phones at the times they specified when registering for
the study.
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p>To encourage a broad range of vocabulary, Fisher participants are
asked to
speak on an assigned topic which is selected at random from a list,
which
changes every 24 hours and which is assigned to all subjects paired on
that
day. Some topics are inherited or refined from previous Switchboard
studies
while others were developed specifically for the Fisher protocol. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p>In collecting data for this corpus, attempts were made to provide a
representative distribution of subjects across a variety of demographic
categories including: gender, age, dialect region, and education
level.
Native speakers of Caribbean Spanish and non-Caribbean Spanish were
recruited
from within the continental <st1:country-region><st1:place>United
States</st1:place></st1:country-region>
and <st1:place>Puerto Rico</st1:place>. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p>The speech recordings consist of 819 telephone conversations of 10
to 12
minutes in duration. They are provided as digital audio files in NIST
SPHERE
format (1024-byte ASCII file headers). The conversations were recorded
as
2-channel mu-law sample data with 8000 samples per second (as captured
from the
public telephone network).<o:p></o:p></p>
<br>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;">[<a href="#top">
top </a>]<br>
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center">*<o:p></o:p></p>
<p><a name="transcripts">(2)</a> <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2010T04">Fisher
Spanish - Transcripts</a> was developed by LDC and contains full
orthographic
transcripts of the telephone speech in <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2010S01">Fisher
Spanish Speech (LDC2010S01)</a>. Transcripts cover roughly 163 hours of
telephone speech from 136 native Caribbean Spanish and non-Caribbean
Spanish
speakers. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p>The transcript files are in plain-text, tab-delimited format (tdf)
with
UTF-8 character encoding. They were created with the LDC-developed
transcription tool <a href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/tools/XTrans/">"XTrans"</a>,
which allowed for improved handling of multi-channel audio and
overlapping
speakers. XTrans is available from LDC. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p>Transcribers followed LDC's <a
href="imap://ldc@mail.ldc.upenn.edu:993/fetch%3EUID%3E/INBOX%3E751173/;section=2.2?part=1.1.2&filename=trans_guide_nqrt_span.doc">Transcription
Guidelines (NQTR)</a>, which are included with the documentation for
this
release. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p><a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2010S01">Fisher
Spanish Speech (LDC2010S01)</a> provides the digital audio used as the
basis
for the transcriptions in this corpus, in the form of 2-channel mu-law
sample
data with 8000 samples per second (as captured from the public
telephone
network), for 819 telephone conversations of 10 to 12 minutes in
duration. The
audio files are in NIST <st1:stockticker>SPH</st1:stockticker>ERE
format
(1024-byte ASCII file headers). <o:p></o:p></p>
[<a href="#top">
top </a>]
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center"><a
name="65"></a><b>65,000th LDC
Corpus Distributed!</b>
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><b><br>
</b>LDC has recently reached another milestone. Two years after having
distributed our 50,000th corpus, we have just distributed our
65,000th!
To help us celebrate, we took the names of all the organizations that
had
licensed data on the day we distributed our 65,000th corpus and tossed
them
into a Phillies baseball cap. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;">We then randomly drew
a name,
and the winner is ...<st1:place><st1:placename>Swarthmore</st1:placename>
<st1:placetype>College</st1:placetype></st1:place>
and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid! That's not a typo, we have two
lucky winners! We are celebrating our 65,000th distribution by
awarding a
benefit of US$2000 each to both <st1:place><st1:placename>Swarthmore</st1:placename>
<st1:placetype>College</st1:placetype></st1:place> and Universidad
Carlos III
de Madrid. The benefit can be used towards membership or data licensing
fees at
any time this year.<br>
<br>
<st1:place><st1:placename>Swarthmore</st1:placename> <st1:placetype>College</st1:placetype></st1:place>
and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid join our other recipients of
landmark corpora
distributions:<o:p></o:p></p>
<ul type="disc">
<li class="MsoNormal" style=""> Helsinki University of Technology,
Adaptive Informatics Research Centre (AIRC) - licensed our 50,000th
distribution in January 2008.<o:p></o:p></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style=""> Instituto de Engenharia de
Sistemas e Computadores (INESC) - licensed our 40,000th distribution in
November 2006.<o:p></o:p></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style=""> <st1:place><st1:placetype>University</st1:placetype>
of <st1:placename>Hawai'i</st1:placename></st1:place>, Manoa, Language
Analysis and Experimentation Laboratories - licensed our 15,000th
distribution in April 2002.<o:p></o:p></li>
</ul>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;">We would like to
thank both
members and non-members for helping the LDC reach this landmark
distribution.
The unceasing demand for LDC data from over 2800 organizations supports
our
mission to develop and share resources for research in human language
technologies. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><br>
About our winners:<o:p></o:p></p>
<blockquote>
<p class="MsoNormal"><st1:place><st1:placename>Swarthmore</st1:placename>
<st1:placetype>College</st1:placetype></st1:place>
~ The Department of Computer Science offers courses that emphasize the
fundamental concepts of computer science, treating today's languages
and
systems as current examples of the underlying concepts. By educating
students
to think conceptually, we are preparing them to adapt to developments
in this
dynamic field. <br>
<br>
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid ~ The Multimedia Processing Group aims
to make
a significant research contribution to the field of multimedia
processing,
especially focusing on combining signal analysis tools with emerging
machine
learning methods. Projects include automatic multimedia indexing,
automatic
speech recognition, and last-generation video coding. <o:p></o:p></p>
</blockquote>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><br>
<span style=""></span>[<a href="#top">
top </a>]<o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><br style="">
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="text-align: center;" align="center"><b><a name="pipeline"></a></b><b>2010
Publications Pipeline</b><o:p></o:p></p>
<p>For Membership Year 2010 (MY2010), we anticipate releasing a varied
selection of publications. Many publications are still in development,
but here
is a glimpse of what is in the pipeline for MY2010. Please note that
this
list is tentative and subject to modifications. Our planned
publications
for the coming months include:<o:p></o:p></p>
<blockquote>
<p class="MsoNormal" style=""><i>Arabic
Treebank: Part 3 v 3.2</i> ~ a revision of Arabic Treebank: Part 3
(full
corpus) v 2.0 (MPG + Syntactic Analysis (LDC2005T20). The full Arabic
Treebank: Part 3 has been revised according to the new Arabic Treebank
annotation guidelines. The Arabic Treebank project consists of two
distinct phases: (a) Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging which divides the
text into
lexical tokens, and gives relevant information about each token such as
lexical
category, inflectional features, and a gloss, and (b) Arabic
Treebanking which
characterizes the constituent structures of word sequences, provides
categories
for each non-terminal node, and identifies null elements, co-reference,
traces,
etc. on-terminal node. Arabic Treebank: Part 3 v 3.2 consists of 599
newswire stories from An Nahar.
<br>
<br>
<i>Chinese Treebank 7.0</i> ~ this release encompasses 2400 text
files,
containing 45000 sentences, 1.1 million words and 1.65 million hanzi
(Chinese
characters). The data is provided in two encodings: GBK and UTF-8, and
the annotation
has Penn Treebank-style labeled brackets. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style=""><i>Chinese
Web 5-gram Version 1</i> ~ contains n-grams (unigrams to five-grams)
and their
observed counts in 880 billion tokens of Chinese web data collected in
March
2008. All text was converted to UTF-8. A simple segmenter using the
same
algorithm used to generate the data is included. The set contains 3.9
billion
n-grams total.<br>
<br>
<i>NPS Chat Corpus Version 1.0</i> ~ consists of 10,567 posts
gathered from
age-specific chat rooms. Each file is a recording transcript from one
of these
chat rooms for a short period on a particular day. In order to comply
with the chat services' terms of service, the posts have been
privacy-masked.
Each post is annotated with a chat dialog-act tag, and individual
tokens
within each post are annotated with part-of-speech tags. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style=""><i>WTIMIT</i>
~ is a mobile wideband (i.e., 50 Hz – 7kHz) telephone adjunct to TIMIT
(LDC93S1). WTIMIT has been derived as follows: the original TIMIT
speech files at 16 kHz sampling rate were concatenated to 11 signal
chunks each
being preceded by a 4 second calibration tone. These speech chunks were
transmitted via two prepared Nokia 6220 mobile phones over T-Mobile’s
3G
wideband mobile network in <st1:city><st1:place>The Hague</st1:place></st1:city>,
The Netherlands, employing the Adaptive Multirate Wideband (AMR-WB)
speech
codec. After data acquisition and deconcatenation by maximizing the
normalized
cross-correlation with the original speech files, a database was
obtained that
is time aligned with the original TIMIT data with good precision.
Accordingly,
all TIMIT label files can still be used. WTIMIT is suitable for
research
on speech quality and intelligibility, and investigations on possible
wideband
upgrades of network-sided IVR systems with retrained or bandwidth
extended
acoustic models for automatic speech recognition. WTIMIT will be
presented at LREC2010.<o:p></o:p></p>
</blockquote>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;">2010
Subscription Members are automatically sent all MY2010 data as it is
released. 2010 Standard Members are entitled to request 16 corpora for
free from MY2010. Non-members may license most data for
research-use only.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;">[<a href="#top">
top </a>]
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: center;"
align="left"><br>
</p>
<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>
<br>
<font face="Courier New, Courier, monospace"><small>--------------------------------------------------------------------</small></font><br>
</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">
</pre>
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