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<p align="center"><i>In this newsletter:<br>
</i></p>
<p align="center"> - <b><a href="#scholar">Fall
2010 LDC Data Scholarship Program</a></b>
-<br>
</p>
<p align="center"><b>- </b><a href="8#provide"><b>New
Providing
Guideline</b>s</a><b> -</b><br>
</p>
<p align="center"><i>New publications:</i><br>
</p>
<p align="center">LDC2010S05<br>
<b>- <a href="#elephant">Asian
Elephant Vocalizations</a></b><b> -<br>
</b></p>
<p align="center"><span
style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Liberation Serif";">LDC2010T14</span><br>
<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Liberation Serif";"><b>- </b></span><b><a
href="#openmt">NIST
2005 Open Machine
Translation (OpenMT) Evaluation</a></b><span
style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Liberation Serif";"><b> -</b><br>
</span></p>
<div align="center">LDC2010V02<br>
<b>- <a href="#trecvid">TRECVID
2006 Keyframes</a></b><b> -<br>
</b></div>
<div align="center"><b><br>
</b>
<hr size="2" width="100%"><b><br>
</b></div>
<p style="text-align: center;" align="center"><a name="scholar"></a><b>Fall
2010 LDC Data
Scholarship
Program</b><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Applications are now being accepted through <st1:date
year="2010" day="15" month="9">September 15, 2010</st1:date> for the
Fall 2010
LDC Data Scholarship program! The LDC Data Scholarship program
provides university students with access to LDC data at no-cost. Data
scholarships
are offered twice a year to correspond to the Fall and Spring
semesters,
beginning with the Fall 2010 semester (September - December 2010).
Several
students can be awarded scholarships during each program cycle. This
program is open to students pursuing both undergraduate and graduate
studies in
an accredited college or university. LDC Data Scholarships are not
restricted
to any particular field of study; however, students must demonstrate a
well-developed research agenda and a bona fide inability to pay. <br>
<br>
The application consists of two parts:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">(1) <em><b>Data Use Proposal</b></em>. Applicants
must
submit a proposal describing their intended use of the data. The
proposal must
contain the applicant's name, university, and field of study. The
proposal
should state which data the student plans to use and contain a
description of
their research project. Students are advised to consult the <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/index.jsp">LDC Corpus Catalog</a>
for a
complete list of data distributed by LDC. Due to certain restrictions,
a
handful of LDC corpora are restricted to members of the Consortium. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p>(2) <em><b>Letter of Support</b></em>. Applicants must submit one
letter of
support from their thesis advisor or department chair. The letter must
verify
the student's need for data and confirm that the department or
university lacks
the funding to pay the full Non-member Fee for the data.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p>For further information on application materials and program rules,
please
visit the <a href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/About/scholarships.html">LDC
Data
Scholarship</a> page. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p>Students can email their applications to the <a
href="mailto:datascholarships@ldc.upenn.edu">LDC Data Scholarship
program</a>.
Decisions will be sent by email from the same address.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p>The deadline for the Fall 2010 program cycle is <st1:date
year="2010" day="15" month="9">September 15, 2010</st1:date>.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p>Track the LDC Data Scholarship program at <a
href="http://www.wikicfp.com/">WikiCFP</a>!<br>
</p>
<p>
[<a href="#top">
top </a>]<br>
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="text-align: center;" align="center"><a name="provide"></a><b>New
Providing
Guidelines</b><o:p></o:p></p>
<p>LDC is pleased to announce that our <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Providing/">Providing</a> page has been
recently
updated and enhanced to reflect detailed guidelines for submitting
corpora and
other resources for publication by LDC. The new Providing page
describes the
entire process of sharing data through LDC from the initial publication
inquiry
to delivery of the data for publication. LDC's preferred submission
formats for
video, audio, and text data and directory structure, and best practices
for
file naming conventions are covered in depth. The page also includes
information on providing adequate metadata and documentation of your
data set.<br>
<br>
Researchers interested in publishing data through LDC are invited to
use the <a href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Providing/subform.html">Publication
Inquiry Form</a>.
The inquiry form will prompt you for basic information about your data
including title, author, language, details on corpus size and format,
as well
as a description. Once your inquiry has been received, our External
Relations staff can assist you through each step of the publication
process.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 12pt;">Why share your data through LDC?
Resources distributed by LDC reach a global audience. All published
resources
appear in LDC’s online <a href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog">Catalog</a>,
which is accessed daily by users worldwide. LDC’s monthly newsletter
keeps the
community abreast of all new publications, and its reach ensures the
attention
of interested researchers. LDC members receive copies of the corpora as
part of
their membership benefits. LDC’s Membership structure therefore
guarantees your
data greater exposure to major organizations working in human language
technologies <span style=""> </span>and related fields.<br>
<br>
The LDC Corpus Catalog contains a variety of resources in many
languages and
formats ranging from written to spoken and video. Speech and video data
may
derive from broadcast collections, interviews, and recordings of
telephone
conversations. Text data comes from a variety of sources including
newswire,
document archives and anthologies as well as the World Wide Web. LDC
also
publishes dictionaries and lexicons in a variety of languages.<br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 12pt;">
[<a href="#top">
top </a>] <o:p></o:p></p>
<p style="text-align: center;" align="center"><b><span
style="font-family: "Liberation Serif";">New
Publications</span></b><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><a name="elephant"></a>(1) <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2010S05">Asian
Elephant Vocalizations</a> consists of 57.5 hours of audio recordings
of
vocalizations by Asian Elephants (<i>Elephas maximus</i>) in the Uda
Walawe
National Park, Sri Lanka, of which 31.25 hours have been annotated. The
collection and annotation of the recordings was conducted and overseen
by
Shermin de Silva, of the University of Pennsylvania Department of
Biology;
voice recording field notes are of Shermin de Silva and Ashoka
Ranjeewa. The
recordings primarily feature adult female and juvenile elephants.
Existing
knowledge of acoustic communication in elephants is based primarily on
African
species (<i>Loxodonta africana</i> and <i>Loxodonta cyclotis</i>).
There has
been comparatively less study of communication in Asian elephants.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p>This corpus is intended to enable researchers in acoustic
communication to
evaluate acoustic features and repertoire diversity of the recorded
population.
Of particular interest is whether there may be regional dialects that
differ
among Asian elephant populations in the wild and in captivity. A second
interest is in whether structural commonalities exist between this and
other
species that shed light on underlying social and ecological factors
shaping
communication systems.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p>Data were collected from May, 2006 to December, 2007. Observations
were
performed by vehicle during park hours from 0600 to 1830 h. Most
recordings of
vocalizations were made using an Earthworks QTC50 microphone
shock-mounted inside
a Rycote Zeppelin windshield, via a Fostex FR-2 field recorder (24-bit
sample
size, sampling rate 48 kHz). Recordings were initiated at the start of
a call
with a 10-s pre-record buffer so that the entire call was captured and
loss of
rare vocalizations minimized. This was made possible with the
'pre-record'
feature of the Fostex, which records continuously, but only saves the
file with
a 10-second lead once the 'record' button is depressed.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p>Certain audio files were manually annotated, to the extent possible,
with
call type, caller id, and miscellaneous notes. For call type
annotation, there
are three main categories of vocalizations: those that show clear
fundamental
frequencies (periodic), those that do not (a-periodic), and those that
show
periodic and a-periodic regions as at least two distinct segments.
Calls were
identified as belonging to one of 14 categories. Annotations were made
using the <a
href="http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/TextGridEditor.html">Praat
TextGrid Editor</a>, which allows spectral analysis and annotation of
audio
files with overlapping events. Annotations were based on written and
audio-recorded field notes, and in some cases video recordings.
Miscellaneous
notes are free-form, and include such information as distance from
source,
caller identity certainty, and accompanying behavior.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><br>
</p>
<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="openmt"></a><span style="font-family: "Liberation Serif";">(2)
<a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2010T14">NIST
2005 Open Machine Translation (OpenMT) Evaluation</a> is a package
containing
source data, reference translations, and scoring software used in the
NIST 2005
OpenMT evaluation. It is designed to help evaluate the effectiveness of
machine
translation systems. The package was compiled and scoring software was
developed by researchers at NIST, making use of newswire source data
and
reference translations collected and developed by LDC. </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p>The objective of the NIST OpenMT evaluation series is to support
research
in, and help advance the state of the art of, machine translation (MT)
technologies
-- technologies that translate text between human languages. Input may
include
all forms of text. The goal is for the output to be an adequate and
fluent
translation of the original. The 2004 task was to evaluate translation
from Chinese to English and from Arabic to English. Additional
information
about these evaluations may be found at the <a
href="http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/mig/tests/mt/">NIST Open Machine
Translation
(OpenMT) Evaluation web site</a>.<br>
<br>
This evaluation kit includes a single perl script (mteval-v11a.pl) that
may be
used to produce a translation quality score for one (or more) MT
systems. The
script works by comparing the system output translation with a set of
(expert)
reference translations of the same source text. Comparison is based on
finding
sequences of words in the reference translations that match word
sequences in
the system output translation.<br>
<br>
<span style="font-family: "Liberation Serif";">This corpus consists of
100 Arabic
newswire documents, 100 Chinese newswire documents, and a corresponding
set of
four separate human expert reference translations. Source text for both
languages was collected from Agence France-Presse and Xinhua News
Agency in
December 2004 and January 2005.</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p>For each language, the test set consists of two files: a source and
a
reference file. Each reference file contains four independent
translations of
the data set. The evaluation year, source language, test set, version
of the
data, and source vs. reference file are reflected in the file name.
</p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center"><br>
<o:p><br>
</o:p>*<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoBodyText"><a name="trecvid"></a>(3) <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2010V02">TRECVID
2006 Keyframes</a> was developed as a collaborative effort between
researchers
at LDC, <a href="http://www.nist.gov/">NIST</a>, <a
href="http://www.limsi.fr/">LIMSI-CNRS</a>,
and <a href="http://www.dcu.ie/">Dublin City University</a> <span
style=""> </span>TREC Video Retrieval Evaluation (TRECVID) is
sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
to
promote progress in content-based retrieval from digital video via
open,
metrics-based evaluation. The keyframes in this release were extracted
for use
in the NIST TRECVID 2006 Evaluation. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoBodyText">TRECVID is a laboratory-style evaluation that
attempts to
model real world situations or significant component tasks involved in
such
situations. In 2006 TRECVID <span style=""> </span>completed a
2-year cycle on English, Arabic, and Chinese news video. There weree
three
system tasks and associated tests: <o:p></o:p></p>
<ul type="disc">
<li class="MsoNormal" style="">shot boundary determination<o:p></o:p></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="">high-level feature extraction<o:p></o:p></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="">search (interactive,
manually-assisted, and/or fully automatic)<o:p></o:p></li>
</ul>
<p class="MsoBodyText">For a detailed description of the TRECVID
Evaluation
Tasks, please refer to the <a
href="http://www-nlpir.nist.gov/projects/tv2006/">NIST
TRECVID 2006 Evaluation Description.</a><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoBodyText">The video stills that compose this corpus are
drawn from
approximately 158.6 hours of English, Arabic, and Chinese language
video data
collected by LDC from NBC, CNN, MSNBC, New Tang Dynasty TV, Phoenix TV,
Lebanese Broadcasting Corp., and China Central TV. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoBodyText">Shots are fundamental units of video, useful for
higher-level processing. To create the master list of shots, the video
was
segmented. The results of this pass are called subshots. Because the
master
shot reference is designed for use in manual assessment, a second pass
over the
segmentation was made to create the master shots of at least 2 seconds
in
length. These master shots are the ones used in submitting results for
the
feature and search tasks in the evaluation. In the second pass,
starting at the
beginning of each file, the subshots were aggregated, if necessary,
until the
current shot was at least 2 seconds in duration, at which point the
aggregation
began anew with the next subshot. <br>
<br>
The keyframes were selected by going to the middle frame of the shot
boundary,
then parsing left and right of that frame to locate the nearest
I-Frame. This
then became the keyframe and was extracted. Keyframes have been
provided at
both the subshot (NRKF) and master shot (RKF) levels.<o:p></o:p></p>
<br>
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72"><big><font
face="Courier New, Courier, monospace"><small><small><big>
Ilya Ahtaridis</big></small></small></font>
<font face="Courier New, Courier, monospace"><small><small><big>Membership Coordinator</big></small></small></font></big>
<font face="Courier New, Courier, monospace"><small>--------------------------------------------------------------------</small></font>
<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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