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<p class="MsoNormal" align="center"><a href="#scholar"><b> Fall
2011 LDC Data Scholarships recipients <br>
</b></a></p>
<div align="center"> </div>
<div align="center"><i>New publications:</i></div>
<div align="center"> </div>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center">LDC2011S08 <br>
<a href="#sre"><b>2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation
Test Set </b></a><br>
</p>
<div align="center"> </div>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center">LDC2011T11 <br>
<a href="#argig"><b>Arabic Gigaword Fifth Edition </b></a> </p>
<div align="center"> </div>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center">LDC2011T12 <br>
<a href="#sp"><b>Spanish Gigaword Third Edition</b></a></p>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"
align="center">
<hr width="100%" align="center" size="2"></div>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center"><b><br>
</b><a name="scholar"></a><b>Fall 2011 LDC Data Scholarships
recipients</b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">LDC is pleased to announce the student
recipients of the Fall 2011 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.
Students are asked to complete an application which consists
of a data use proposal and letter of support from their
academic adviser. <br>
<br>
LDC received many strong applications from students attending
universities across the globe. We've reviewed all the
applications, and after careful consideration, we have
selected four scholarship recipients! These students will
receive no-cost copies of LDC data:</p>
<blockquote>
<p class="MsoNormal">Haris B C - Indian Institute of
Technology Guwahati (India), Electronics & Electrical
Engineering. Haris has been awarded a copy of 2005 NIST
Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Data (LDC2011S01)
and 2005 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Data
(LDC2011S04) to evaluate the performance of a sparse
representation speaker verification system. <br>
<br>
Friðjón Guðjohnsen - Reykjavik University (Iceland),
Computer Science. Friðjón has been awarded a copy of
Treebank-3 (LDC99T42) to be used in the development of
tagging methods to improve the accuracy of tagging Icelandic
texts.<br>
<br>
Leili Javadpour - Louisiana State University (USA),
Engineering Science. Leili has been awarded a copy of BBN
Pronoun Coreference and Entity Type Corpus (LDC2005T33) and
Message Understanding Conference (MUC) 7 (LDC2001T02) for
her work in pronominal anaphora resolution.<br>
<br>
Jad Makhlouta - American University of Beirut (Lebanon),
Electrical and Computer Engineering. Jad has been awarded a
copy of LDC Standard Arabic Morphological Analyzer (SAMA)
Version 3.1 (LDC2010L01) for his work in Arabic text mining.</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="MsoNormal"> Please join us in congratulating our
student recipients! <a style=""> Look for our upcoming
announcements about the submissions deadlines for the Spring
2012 <span style=""></span>LDC Data Scholarship program</a><span
style=""></span>. </p>
<b></b><br>
<p class="MsoNormal"> <br>
</p>
<div align="center"> <b>New publications</b></div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a name="sre"></a>(1) <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2011S08">2008
NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set</a> was
developed by LDC and NIST (National Institute of Standards and
Technology). It contains 942 hours of multilingual telephone
speech and English interview speech along with transcripts and
other materials used as test data in the <a
href="http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/mig/tests/spk/2008/index.html">2008
NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE)</a>. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">NIST SRE is part of an ongoing series of
evaluations conducted by NIST. They are intended to be of
interest to all researchers working on the general problem of
text independent speaker recognition. The 2008 evaluation was
distinguished from prior evaluations, in particular those in
2005 and 2006, by including not only conversational telephone
speech data but also conversational speech data of comparable
duration recorded over a microphone channel involving an
interview scenario.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">LDC previously released the 2008 NIST SRE
Training Set in two parts as <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2011S05">LDC2011S05</a>
and <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2011S07">LDC2011S07</a>.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The speech data in this release was
collected in 2007 by LDC at its <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/About/facilities.shtml">Human
Subjects Data Collection Laboratories</a> in Philadelphia
and by the <a href="http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/">International
Computer Science Institute</a> (ICSI) at the University of
California, Berkeley. This collection was part of the <a
href="http://projects.ldc.upenn.edu/Mixer/">Mixer 5</a>
project, which was designed to support the development of
robust speaker recognition technology by providing carefully
collected and audited speech from a large pool of speakers
recorded simultaneously across numerous microphones and in
different communicative situations and/or in multiple
languages. Mixer participants were native English and
bilingual English speakers. The telephone speech in this
corpus is predominantly English, but also includes the above
languages. All interview segments are in English. Telephone
speech represents approximately 368 hours of the data, whereas
microphone speech represents the other 574 hours. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">English language transcripts in .cfm format
were produced using an automatic speech recognition (ASR)
system.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br>
<br>
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center">*</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a name="argig"></a>(2) <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2011T11">Arabic
Gigaword Fifth Edition</a> is a comprehensive archive of
newswire text data that has been acquired from Arabic news
sources over several years by LDC. Arabic Gigaword Fifth
Edition includes all of the content of the fourth edition of
Arabic Gigaword (<a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2009T30">LDC2009T30</a>)
plus new data covering the period from January 1, 2009 through
December 31, 2010.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Nine distinct sources of Arabic newswire
are represented in this distribution:<br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p class="MsoNormal">Asharq Al-Awsat (aaw_arb)</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Agence France Presse (afp_arb)</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Al-Ahram (ahr_arb)</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Assabah (asb_arb)</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Al Hayat (hyt_arb)</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">An Nahar (nhr_arb)</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Al-Quds Al-Arabi (qds_arb)</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Ummah Press (umh_arb)</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Xinhua News Agency (xin_arb)</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="MsoNormal">The seven-character codes shown above
represent both the directory names where the data files are
found, and the 7-letter prefix that appears at the beginning
of every file name. The 7-letter codes consist of the
three-character source name IDs and the three-character
language code ("arb") separated by an underscore ("_")
character. The three-character language code conforms to the <a
href="http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/default.asp">ISO 639-3</a>
standard.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In addition to adding new data, the
following updates were made:</p>
<blockquote>
<p class="MsoNormal">Repeated documents in Asharq Al-Awsat
data from 2008 were removed.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Document formatting and docid duplication
problems were corrected in Agence France Presse <span
style=""> </span>data.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Significant duplication of content in
2007-2008 An Nahar data was detected, and the duplicated
documents were removed.</p>
</blockquote>
<br>
<p class="MsoNormal"> <br>
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center">*</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a name="sp"></a>(3) <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2011T12">Spanish
Gigaword Third Edition</a> was produced by LDC. It is a
comprehensive archive of Spanish newswire text data that has
been acquired over several years by LDC. Spanish Gigaword
Third Edition includes all of the content of the second
edition (<a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2009T21">LDC2009T21</a>)
and adds data collected from January 1, 2009 through December
31, 2010.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The three distinct international sources of
Spanish newswire in this edition, and the time spans of
collection covered for each, are as follows:</p>
<blockquote>
<p class="MsoNormal">Agence France-Presse, Spanish (afp_spa)
May 1994 - Dec 2010</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Associated Press, Spanish (apw_spa) Nov
1993 - Dec 2010</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Xinhua News Agency, Spanish (xin_spa) Sep
2001 - Dec 2010</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="MsoNormal">The seven-letter codes in the parentheses
above include the three-character source name abbreviations
and the three-character language code ("spa") separated by an
underscore ("_") character. The three-letter language code
conforms to LDC's internal convention based on the <a
href="http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/default.asp">ISO 639-3</a>
standard.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">All text data are presented in SGML/XML
form, using a very simple, minimal markup structure; all text
consists of printable ASCII, whitespace, and printable code
points in the "Latin1 Supplement" character table, as defined
by both ISO-8859-1 and the Unicode Standard (ISO 10646) for
the "accented" characters used in Spanish. The
Supplement/accented characters are rendered using UTF-8
encoding.</p>
<br>
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<br>
<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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