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<div align="center"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><small><big><span
style=""><i>In this newsletter:</i></span></big><b><big><span
style=""></span></big></b></small><br>
<small><b><big><span style=""> </span></big></b></small><br>
<small><b><big><span style=""> </span></big></b></small>- <a
href="#scholar"> <b>Spring 2011 LDC Data Scholarship
Recipients</b> -</a><br>
<br>
<small><b><big><span style=""> </span></big></b><b><big><span
style=""></span><span style=""></span></big></b></small><b><big><span
style="">- </span><span style=""></span></big><a
href="#nea"> LDC at NEALLT 2011</a></b><b><big><span
style="">-</span></big></b><small><b><big><span style=""></span></big></b><b><big><span
style=""></span></big></b></small><br>
<small> <b><big><span style=""></span></big></b><big><span
style=""></span></big></small><small><big><span style=""></span></big></small><br>
<small><big><span style=""><i> New publications:</i></span></big><b><big><span
style=""></span></big></b></small><br>
<small><b><big><span style=""> </span></big></b></small><br>
<small><b><big><span style=""> </span><span style=""></span><big><span
style=""></span></big></big></b><b><big><big><span
style="">- </span></big></big></b></small> <a
href="#matr"> <b>2008/2010 NIST Metrics for Machine
Translation (MetricsMaTr) GALE Evaluation Set</b></a><b><big><span
style=""> -</span></big></b><small><b><big><big><span
style=""></span></big></big></b><big><b><big><span
style=""></span></big></b></big></small><br>
<small><big><b><big> <span style=""></span></big></b></big></small><br>
<small><big><b><big> </big></b><b><big><span style=""></span><span
style=""> </span></big></b></big></small><b><big><span
style="">- </span></big> <a href="#vace"> NIST/USF
Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program – Meeting Data
Training Set Part 1</a></b><b><big><span style=""></span><span
style=""> -</span></big></b><small><big><b><big><span
style=""></span></big></b><b><big><span style=""></span></big></b></big></small></font><br>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><small><b><big><span
style=""></span></big></b></small><b><big><span style=""></span></big></b></font><font
face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b><big><span style=""><br>
</span></big></b><span style=""></span><span style=""></span></font>
<hr width="100%" size="2"><font face="Times New Roman, Times,
serif"><br>
<a name="scholar"></a><b style=""><span style="">Spring 2011 LDC
Data Scholarship Recipients</span></b><span style=""></span><br>
<span style=""></span></font> </div>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><span style=""> </span><br>
<span style=""> LDC is pleased to announce the student recipients
of the Spring 2011 LDC Data Scholarship program! The LDC Data
Scholarship program provides university students with access to
LDC data at no-cost. Students were asked to complete an
application which consisted of a proposal describing their
intended use of the data, as well as a letter of support from
their thesis adviser. LDC received many solid applications from
both undergraduate and graduate students attending universities
across the globe. After careful deliberation, we have chosen
eight proposals to support. These students will receive
no-cost copies of LDC data:</span></font>
<blockquote> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><span
style="">Roberto Aceves - Monterrey Institute of Technology
and Superior Studies, ITESM (Mexico), graduate student,
Computer Science. Roberto has been awarded a copy of <i>Speech
in Noisy Environments (SPINE2) Part 1 Audio</i> and <i>Transcripts</i>
(LDC2001S04 and LDC2001T05) for his research in automatic
speech recognition in noisy environments.<br>
<br>
</span></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><span
style=""> Daniel Escobar - Monterrey Institute of Technology
and Superior Studies, ITESM (Mexico), graduate student,
Mechatronics and Automation. Daniel has been awarded a copy
of <i><br>
Switchboard-2 Phase I (LDC98S75) </i>and<i> 2003 NIST
Spearker Recognition Evaluation (LDC2010S03)</i>for
designing a parallel joint factor analysis architecture for a
speaker verification system.<br>
<br>
Erhan Guven - The George Washington University (USA), graduate
student, Computer Science. Erhan has been awarded a copy of <i>Emotional
Prosody (LDC2002S28)</i> for his work in classifying
emotions based on features in spectrograms.<br>
<br>
Anup Kolya - Jadavpur University (India), graduate student,
Computer Science and Engineering. Anup has been awarded a
copy of <i>ACE 2005 English SpatialML Annotations
(LDC2008T03), ACE Time Normalization (TERN) 2004 English
Evaluation Data V1.0 (LDC2010T18), </i>and<i> ACE Time
Normalization (TERN) 2004 English Training Data v 1.0
(LDC2005T07) </i>for his research in temporal information
extraction. <br>
<br>
Benjamín Martínez Elizalde - Monterrey Institute of Technology
and Superior Studies, ITESM (Mexico), graduate student,
Computer Science. Benjamín has been awarded a copy of <i>Switchboard-1
Release 2 (LDC97S62) </i>and<i> 2002 NIST Spearker
Recognition Evaluation (LDC2004S04)</i><i></i> <i> </i>to
support his research in speaker verification modeling.<br>
<br>
Hanan Waer - Newcastle University (UK), graduate student,
Educational and Applied Linguistics. Hanan has been awarded a
copy of <i>CALLHOME Egyptian Arabic Transcripts (LDC97T19)</i>,
<i>CALLHOME Egyptian Arabic Transcripts Supplement
(LDC2002T38)</i>, and <i>Egyptian Colloquial Arabic Lexicon
(LDC99L22)</i> for her research in comparing Arabic/English
code switching in everyday Arabic conversation and academic
discourse.<br>
<br>
Muhua Zhu - Northeastern University (China), graduate student,
Natural Language Processing. Muhua has been awarded a copy
of <i>Chinese Treebank 7.0</i> (LDC2010T07) to support the
development of a high-accuracy Chinese parser.<br>
<br>
Vignesh Kalaiselvan, Ganapathy Raman Kasi, Preetham Samue,
Ramsrinivas Anantharamakrishnan, and Sathyanarayan Jeevan -
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham University (India), undergraduate
students, Electronics and Communication Engineering - the
group has been awarded <i>CALLHOME Speech, Transcripts, </i>and<i>
Lexicon</i> in Egyptian Arabic and German for their research
in deriving robust features for multilingual acoustic
modeling.</span></font> </blockquote>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><span style=""></span><br>
<span style=""> Please join us in congratulating our student
winners! The next LDC Data Scholarship program is scheduled
for the Fall 2011 semester. <br>
<br>
</span> <span style=""> </span><br>
<span style=""> </span></font>
<div align="center"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><a
name="nea"></a><b><span style="">LDC at NEALLT 2011<br>
</span></b><span style=""></span><br>
<span style=""></span></font> </div>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><span style=""> LDC will
be exhibiting at the upcoming NEALLT (North East Association for
Language Learning Technology) conference, which will be held at
the University of Pennsylvania from 1-3 April 2011. <a
href="http://neallt.org/"><span style="color: blue;">NEALLT</span></a>
is the regional chapter of the International Association for
Language Learning Technology and works to improve language
instruction through the use of technology.</span><br>
<span style=""> </span><br>
<span style=""> How resources developed and distributed by LDC can
aid language education will be discussed by LDC’s Dr Mohamed
Maamouri in the presentation “Incorporating Resources and New
Technologies in Language Education” on Saturday, April 2
(Session 9: 4.00-4.20 pm, Cohen G17). That presentation will
highlight the LDC <a href="http://projects.ldc.upenn.edu/art/"><span
style="color: blue;">Arabic Reading Enhancement Tool</span></a>,
designed to support the development of reading skills for
learning Arabic as a first and second language.</span><br>
<span style=""> </span><br>
<span style=""> </span><span style=""></span><br>
</font>
<div align="center"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b><span
style="">New Publications</span></b></font><br>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b><span style=""></span></b></font></div>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b><span style=""><br>
</span></b><b><span style=""></span></b><a name="matr"></a><span
style="">(1) <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2011T05">2008/2010
NIST Metrics for Machine Translation (MetricsMaTr) GALE
Evaluation Set (LDC2011T05)</a> is a package containing source
data, reference translations, machine translations and
associated human judgments used in the NIST 2008 and 2010
MetricsMaTr evaluations. The package was compiled by researchers
at NIST, making use of Arabic and Chinese broadcast, newswire
and web data and reference translations collected and developed
by LDC for Phase 2 and Phase 2.5 of the DARPA <a
href="http://projects.ldc.upenn.edu/gale/index.html"><span
style="color: blue;">GALE </span></a>program. <br>
<br>
</span><span style=""><a
href="http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/mig/tests/metricsmatr/"><span
style="color: blue;">NIST MetricsMaTr</span></a> is a series
of research challenge events for machine translation (MT)
metrology, promoting the development of innovative MT metrics
that correlate highly with human assessments of MT quality.
Participants submit their metrics to NIST (National Institute of
Standards and Technology). NIST runs those metrics on certain
held-back test data for which it has human assessments measuring
quality and then calculates correlations between the automatic
metric scores and the human assessments. Specifically, the goals
of MetricsMATR are: to inform other MT technology evaluation
campaigns and conferences with regard to improved metrology; to
establish an infrastructure that encourages the development of
innovative metrics; to build a diverse community that will bring
new perspectives to MT metrology research; and to provide a
forum for MT metrology discussion and for establishing future
directions of MT metrology. <br>
<br>
</span><span style="">The first MetricsMaTr challenge was held in
<a
href="http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/mig/tests/metricsmatr/2008/"><span
style="color: blue;">2008</span></a>; the development data
from the 2008 program is available from LDC, <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2009T05"><span
style="color: blue;">2008 NIST Metrics for Machine
Translation (MetricsMATR08) Development Data LDC2009T05</span></a>.
The <a
href="https://secure.ldc.upenn.edu/intranet/docs/NISTMetricsMaTr10EvalPlan.pdf"><span
style="color: blue;">MetricsMaTr10 evaluation plan</span></a>
is included in this release.<br>
<br>
</span><span style=""> This release contains 149 documents with
corresponding reference translations (Arabic-to-English and
Chinese-to-English), system translations and human assessments.
The human assessments include the following: Adequacy7 (a
7-point scale for judging the meaning of a system translation
with respect to the reference translation); Adequacy Yes/No
(whether the given system segment meant essentially the same as
the reference translation); Preference (the judges' preference
between two candidate translations when compared to a human
reference translation); and HTER (Human Targeted Error Rate,
human edits to a system translation to have the same meaning as
a reference translation). </span><br>
<span style=""> </span><br>
<span style=""> </span><span style=""><br>
<br>
</span></font>
<div align="center"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><span
style=""><b>* </b></span></font><br>
</div>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><span style=""> </span><br>
<span style=""> </span><br>
<span style=""> </span><a name="vace"></a><span style="">(2) <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2011V01">NIST/USF
Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program – Meeting Data
Training Set Part 1 (LDC2011V01)</a> was developed by
researchers at the <a href="http://www.cse.usf.edu/"><span
style="color: blue;">Department of Computer Science and
Engineering</span></a>, University of South Florida (USF),
Tampa, Florida and the <a href="http://nist.gov/itl/iad/mig/"><span
style="color: blue;">Multimodal Information Group</span></a>
at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). It
contains approximately fifteen hours of meeting room video data
collected in 2001 and 2002 at NIST's Meeting Data Collection
Laboratory and annotated for the VACE (Video Analysis and
Content Extraction Program) 2005 face, person and hand detection
and tracking tasks.<br>
<br>
</span> <span style="">The VACE program was established to
develop novel algorithms for automatic video content extraction,
multi-modal fusion, and event understanding. During VACE Phases
I and II, the program made significant progress in the automated
detection and tracking of moving objects including faces, hands,
people, vehicles and text in four primary video domains:
broadcast news, meetings, street surveillance, and unmanned
aerial vehicle motion imagery. Initial results were also
obtained on automatic analysis of human activities and
understanding of video sequences.</span><br>
<span style=""> </span><br>
<span style=""> Three performance evaluations were conducted under
the auspices of the VACE program between 2004 and 2007. The
2005 evaluation was administered by USF in collaboration with
NIST and guided by an advisory forum including the evaluation
participants. <br>
<br>
</span> <span style="">NIST's Meeting Data Collection Laboratory
is designed to collect corpora to support research, development
and evaluation in meeting recognition technologies. It is
equipped to look and sound like a conventional meeting space.
The data collection facility includes five Sony EV1-D30 video
cameras, four of which have stationary views of a center
conference table with a fixed focus and viewing angle, and an
additional "floating" camera which is used to focus on
particular participants, whiteboard or conference table
depending on the meeting forum. The data is captured in a
NIST-internal file format. The video data was extracted from the
NIST format and encoded using the MPEG-2 standard in NTSC
format. </span><br>
<span style=""> </span><br>
<span style=""> </span><br>
</font>
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<div align="center">
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">Ilya Ahtaridis
Membership Coordinator
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Linguistic Data Consortium Phone: 1 (215) 573-1275
University of Pennsylvania Fax: 1 (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></pre>
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
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