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<p class="MsoNormal" align="center"><i>In this newsletter:</i><br>
<br>
<b>- <a href="#timeline"> LDC Timeline – Two Decades of
Milestones</a> -</b><br>
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center"> <i>New publications:</i><br>
<br>
LDC2012V01<br>
<b>- <a href="#vace"> 2005 NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the
VACE Program - Broadcast News</a> -</b><br>
<br>
LDC2012T03 <br>
<b>- <a href="#conll1"> 2009 CoNLL Shared Task Part 1</a> -</b><br>
<br>
LDC2012T04<br>
<b>- <a href="#conll2"> 2009 CoNLL Shared Task Part 2</a> -</b><br>
<br>
LDC2012S05<br>
<b>- <a href="#malach"> USC-SFI MALACH Interviews and
Transcripts English</a> -</b></p>
<o:p></o:p>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:center" align="center"> <small>
</small>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:center" align="center">
<hr align="center" size="2" width="100%"></div>
<div align="center"><a name="timeline"></a><b>LDC Timeline – Two
Decades of Milestones</b><o:p></o:p></div>
<p class="MsoNormal">April 15 marks the “official” 20th anniversary
of LDC’s founding. We’ll be featuring highlights from the last two
decades in upcoming newsletters, on the web and elsewhere.<span
style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>For a start, here’s a brief
timeline of significant milestones.<o:p></o:p></p>
<blockquote><small> </small>
<p class="MsoNormal">1992: The University of Pennsylvania is
chosen as the host site for LDC in response to a call for
proposals issued by DARPA; the mission of the new consortium is
to operate as a specialized data publisher and archive
guaranteeing widespread, long-term availability of language
resources. DARPA provides seed money with the stipulation that
LDC become self-sustaining within five years.<span
style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Mark Liberman assumes
duties as LDC’s Director with a staff that grows to four,
including Jack Godfrey, the Consortium’s first Executive
Director.<o:p></o:p></p>
<small> </small>
<p class="MsoNormal">1993: LDC’s catalog debuts. Early releases
include benchmark data sets such as TIMIT, TIPSTER, CSR and
Switchboard, shortly followed by the Penn Treebank.<span
style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<small> </small>
<p class="MsoNormal">1994: LDC and NIST (the National Institute of
Standards and Technology) enter into a Cooperative R&D
Agreement that provides the framework for the continued
collaboration between the two organizations.<o:p></o:p></p>
<small> </small>
<p class="MsoNormal">1995: Collection of conversational telephone
speech and broadcast programming and transcription commences.
LDC begins its long and continued support for NIST common task
evaluations by providing custom data sets for participants.
Membership and data license fees prove sufficient to support LDC
operations, satisfying the requirement that the Consortium be
self-sustaining.<br>
</p>
1996: The Lexicon Development project, under the direction of Dr.
Cynthia McLemore, begins releasing pronouncing lexicons in
Mandarin, German, Egyptian Colloquial Arabic, Spanish, Japanese,
and American English. By 1997 all 6 are published.
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<small> </small>
<p class="MsoNormal">1997: LDC announces LDC Online, a searchable
index of newswire and speech data with associated tools to
compute n-gram models, mutual information and other analyses.<o:p></o:p></p>
<small> </small>
<p class="MsoNormal">1998: LDC adds annotation to its task
portfolio. Christopher Cieri joins LDC as Executive Director and
develops the annotation operation. <o:p></o:p></p>
<small> </small>
<p class="MsoNormal">1999: Steven Bird joins LDC; the organization
begins to develop tools and best practices for general use. The
Annotation Graph Toolkit results from this effort.<o:p></o:p></p>
<small> </small>
<p class="MsoNormal">2000: LDC expands its support of common task
evaluations from providing corpora to coordinating language
resources across the program. Early examples include the DARPA
TIDES, EARS and GALE programs.<o:p></o:p></p>
<small> </small>
<p class="MsoNormal">2001: The Arabic treebank project begins. <o:p></o:p></p>
<small> </small>
<p class="MsoNormal">2002: LDC moves to its current facilities at
3600 Market Street, Philadelphia with a full-time staff of
approximately 40 persons. <o:p></o:p></p>
<small> </small>
<p class="MsoNormal">2004: LDC introduces the Standard and
Subscription membership options, allowing members to choose
whether to receive all or a subset of the data sets released in
a membership year.<o:p></o:p></p>
<small> </small>
<p class="MsoNormal">2005: LDC makes task specifications and
guidelines available through its projects web pages.<o:p></o:p></p>
<small> </small>
<p class="MsoNormal">2008: LDC introduces programs that provide
discounts for continuing members and those who renew early in
the year. <o:p></o:p></p>
<small> </small>
<p class="MsoNormal">2010: LDC inaugurates the Data Scholarship
program for students with a demonstrable need for data.<o:p></o:p></p>
<small> </small>
<p class="MsoNormal">2012: LDC’s full-time staff of 50 and 196
part-time staff support ongoing projects and operations which
include collecting, developing and archiving data, data
annotation, tool development, sponsored-project support and
multiple collaborations with various partners.<span
style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The general catalog
contains over 500 holdings in more than 50 languages. Over
85,000 copies of more than 1300 titles have been distributed to
3200 organizations in 70 countries.<span style=""> <br>
</span></p>
<small> </small>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br>
<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"></span><o:p></o:p></p>
<small> </small></blockquote>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center"><b>New Publications</b><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br>
<a name="vace"></a>(1) <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2012V01">2005
NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program - Broadcast
News</a> was developed by researchers at the <a
href="http://www.cse.usf.edu/">Department of Computer Science
and Engineering</a>, University of South Florida (USF), Tampa,
Florida and the <a href="http://nist.gov/itl/iad/mig/">Multimodal
Information Group</a> at the National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST). It contains approximately 60 hours of English
broadcast news video data collected by LDC in 1998 and annotated
for the 2005 VACE (Video Analysis and Content Extraction) tasks.
The tasks covered by the broadcast news domain were human face
(FDT) tracking, text strings (TDT) (glyphs rendered within the
video image for the text object detection and tracking task) and
word level text strings (TDT_Word_Level) (videotext OCR task). <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The broadcast news recordings were collected by
LDC in 1998 from CNN Headline News (CNN-HDL) and ABC World News
Tonight (ABC-WNT). CNN HDL is a 24-hour/day cable-TV broadcast
which presents top news stories continuously throughout the day.
ABC-WNT is a daily 30-minute news broadcast that typically covers
about a dozen different news items. Each daily ABC-WNT broadcast
and up to four 30-minute sections of CNN-HDL were recorded each
day. The CNN segments were drawn from that portion of the daily
schedule that happened to include closed captioning. <o:p></o:p></p>
<o:p></o:p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center">*<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a name="conll1"></a>(2)<a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2012T03">
2009 CoNLL Shared Task Part 1</a> contains the Catalan, Czech,
German and Spanish trial corpora, training corpora, development
and test data for the <a
href="http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/conll2009-st/">2009 CoNLL
(Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning) Shared
Task Evaluation</a>. The 2009 Shared Task developed syntactic
dependency annotations, including the semantic dependencies model
roles of both verbal and nominal predicates. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The <a href="http://www.cnts.ua.ac.be/conll/">Conference
on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)</a> is
accompanied every year by a shared task intended to promote
natural language processing applications and evaluate them in a
standard setting. In 2008, the shared task focused on English and
employed a unified dependency-based formalism and merged the task
of syntactic dependency parsing and the task of identifying
semantic arguments and labeling them with semantic roles; that
data has been released by LDC as 2008 CoNLL Shared Task Data (<a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/catalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2009T12">LDC2009T12</a>).
The 2009 task extended the 2008 task to several languages (English
plus Catalan, Chinese, Czech, German, Japanese and Spanish). Among
the new features were comparison of time and space complexity
based on participants' input, and learning curve comparison for
languages with large datasets. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The 2009 shared task was divided into two
subtasks: <o:p></o:p></p>
<blockquote><small> </small>
<p class="MsoNormal">(1) parsing syntactic dependencies <o:p></o:p></p>
<small> </small>
<p class="MsoNormal">(2) identification of arguments and
assignment of semantic roles for each predicate <o:p></o:p></p>
<small> </small></blockquote>
<p class="MsoNormal">The materials in this release consist of
excerpts from the following corpora: <o:p></o:p></p>
<blockquote><small> </small>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://clic.ub.edu/ancora/">Ancora</a>
(Spanish + Catalan): 500,000 words each of annotated news text
developed by the University of Barcelona, Polytechnic University
of Catalonia, the University of Alacante and the University of
the Basque Country <o:p></o:p></p>
<small> </small>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/pdt2.0/">Prague
Dependency Treebank 2.0</a> (Czech): approximately 2 million
words of annotated news, journal and magazine text developed by
Charles University; also available through LDC, <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/catalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2006T01">LDC2006T01</a>
<o:p></o:p></p>
<small> </small>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a
href="http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/projekte/TIGER/">TIGER
Treebank</a> + <a
href="http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/projects/salsa/">SALSA
Corpus</a> (German): approximately 900,000 words of annotated
news text and FrameNet annotation developed by the University of
Potsdam, Saarland University and the University of Stuttgart <o:p></o:p></p>
<small> </small></blockquote>
<o:p></o:p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center">*<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a name="conll2"></a>(3) <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2012T04">2009
CoNLL Shared Task Part 2</a> contains the Chinese and English
trial corpora, training corpora, development and test data for the
<a href="http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/conll2009-st/">2009 CoNLL
(Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning) Shared
Task Evaluation</a>. The 2009 Shared Task developed syntactic
dependency annotations, including the semantic dependencies model
roles of both verbal and nominal predicates. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The materials in this release consist of
excerpts from the following corpora: <o:p></o:p></p>
<blockquote><small> </small>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a
href="http://www.cis.upenn.edu/%7Etreebank">Penn Treebank II</a>
<a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/catalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC95T7">(LDC95T7)</a>
(English): over one million words of annotated English newswire
and other text developed by the University of Pennsylvania <o:p></o:p></p>
<small> </small>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a
href="http://verbs.colorado.edu/%7Empalmer/projects/ace.html">PropBank</a>
<a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/catalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2004T14">(LDC2004T14)</a>
(English): semantic annotation of newswire text from Treebank-2
developed by the University of Pennsylvania <o:p></o:p></p>
<small> </small>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a
href="http://nlp.cs.nyu.edu/meyers/NomBank.html">NomBank</a> <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/catalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2008T23">(LDC2008T23)</a>
(English): argument structure for instances of common nouns in
Treebank-2 and <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/catalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC99T42">Treebank-3
(LDC99T42)</a> texts developed by New York University <o:p></o:p></p>
<small> </small>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a
href="http://www.cis.upenn.edu/%7Echinese/ctb.html">Chinese
Treebank 6.0</a> <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/catalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2007T36"><span
style="mso-comment-continuation:3"><span
style="mso-comment-continuation:4">(LDC2007T36)</span></span></a>(Chinese):
780,000 words (over 1.28 million characters) of annotated
Chinese newswire, magazine and administrative texts and
transcripts from various broadcast news programs developed by
the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Colorado <o:p></o:p></p>
<small> </small>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a
href="http://verbs.colorado.edu/chinese/cpb/">Chinese
Proposition Bank 2.0</a> <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/catalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2008T07">(LDC2008T07)</a>
(Chinese): predicate-argument annotation on 500,000 words from
Chinese Treebank 6.0 developed by the University of Pennsylvania
and the University of Colorado <o:p></o:p></p>
<small> </small></blockquote>
<o:p></o:p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center">*<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a name="malach"></a>(4) <a
href="http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2012S05">USC-SFI
MALACH Interviews and Transcripts English</a> was developed by
The University of Southern California's Shoah Foundation Institute
(USC-SFI), the University of Maryland, IBM and Johns Hopkins
University as part of the <a href="http://malach.umiacs.umd.edu/">MALACH
(Multilingual Access to Large Spoken ArCHives) Project</a>. It
contains approximately 375 hours of interviews from 784
interviewees along with transcripts and other documentation.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Inspired by his experience making Schindler's
List, Steven Spielberg established the Survivors of the Shoah
Visual History Foundation in 1994 to gather video testimonies from
survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust. While most of
those who gave testimony were Jewish survivors, the Foundation
also interviewed homosexual survivors, Jehovah's Witness
survivors, liberators and liberation witnesses, political
prisoners, rescuers and aid providers, Roma and Sinti (Gypsy)
survivors, survivors of eugenics policies, and war crimes trials
participants. In 2006, the Foundation became part of the Dana and
David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the
University of Southern California in Los Angeles and was renamed
as the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and
Education. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The goal of the MALACH project was to develop
methods for improved access to large multinational spoken
archives; the focus was advancing the state of the art of
automatic speech recognition (ASR) and information retrieval. The
characteristics of the USC-SFI collection -- unconstrained,
natural speech filled with disfluencies, heavy accents,
age-related co-articulations, un-cued speaker and language
switching and emotional speech -- were considered well-suited for
that task. The work centered on five languages: English, Czech,
Russian, Polish and Slovak. USC-SFI MALACH Interviews and
Transcripts English was developed for the English speech
recognition experiments. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The speech data in this release was collected
beginning in 1994 under a wide variety of conditions ranging from
quiet to noisy (e.g., airplane over-flights, wind noise,
background conversations and highway noise). Approximately 25,000
of all USC-SFI collected interviews are in English and average
approximately 2.5 hours each. The 784 interviews included in this
release are each a 30 minute section of the corresponding larger
interview. The interviews include accented speech over a wide
range (e.g., Hungarian, Italian, Yiddish, German and Polish). <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">This release includes transcripts of the first
15 minutes of each interview. The transcripts were created using <a
href="http://trans.sourceforge.net/en/presentation.php">Transcriber</a>
1.5.1 and later modified.<o:p></o:p></p>
<o:p></o:p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p><small><o:p> </o:p><br>
</small></p>
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<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>
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