30.3149, FYI: August 2019 Newsletter - LDC

Thu Aug 15 21:59:15 UTC 2019

LINGUIST List: Vol-30-3149. Thu Aug 15 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.3149, FYI: August 2019 Newsletter - LDC

Moderator: Malgorzata E. Cavar (linguist at linguistlist.org)
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Editor for this issue: Everett Green <everett at linguistlist.org>
================================================================

Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2019 17:58:56
From: Membership Coordinator [ldc at ldc.upenn.edu]
Subject: August 2019 Newsletter - LDC

In this newsletter: 
Fall 2019 LDC Data Scholarship Program

New Publications:
Corpus of Conversational Persian Transcripts
TAC KBP Evaluation Source Corpora 2016-2017
Multi-Language Conversational Telephone Speech 2011 -- East Asian
IARPA Babel Igbo Language Pack IARPA-babel306b-v2.0c

Fall 2019 LDC Data Scholarship Program
Students can apply for the Fall 2019 LDC Data Scholarship program now through
September 15, 2019. This scholarship program provides eligible students with
access to LDC data at no cost. For application requirements and program rules,
please visit the LDC Data Scholarship page.

New Publications:

(1) Corpus of Conversational Persian Transcripts contains transcripts from
approximately 20 hours of naturally occurring informal conversations in the
Tehrani dialect of Iranian Persian. 

This data set is extracted from 1,201 minutes of conversations among 22
participants (12 male and 10 female) who recorded their daily phone calls and
face-to-face interactions in a variety of informal settings. Conversations
represent various interaction types (dialogue and group conversation),
settings (home, office, car, café and restaurant), types of relationship
(family, couple, friend, acquaintance), and various communicative goals
(joking, explaining, arguing, and complaining, among others). The
corresponding speech is not included in this release.

The transcripts were annotated for gender, age, recording method, and setting.

Corpus of Conversational Persian Transcripts is distributed via web download. 

2019 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus.
2019 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership
corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee. 

*

(2) TAC KBP Evaluation Source Corpora 2016-2017 was developed by LDC and
contains the 180,003 Chinese, English, and Spanish source documents used in
support of all TAC KBP evaluation tracks conducted in 2016 and 2017. 

The source data consists of Chinese, English, and Spanish discussion forum and
newswire text collected by LDC. Also provided are a series of lists and tables
to aid in the recreation of specific test sets.

Text Analysis Conference (TAC) is a series of workshops organized by the
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), developed to encourage
research in natural language processing and related applications. The
Knowledge Base Population (KBP) track of TAC encourages the development of
systems that can match entities mentioned in natural texts with those
appearing in a knowledge base and extract novel information about entities
from a document collection and add it to a new or existing knowledge base.

TAC KBP Evaluation Source Corpora 2016-2017 is distributed via web download. 

2019 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus.
2019 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership
corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

*

(3) Multi-Language Conversational Telephone Speech 2011 -- East Asian was
developed by LDC and is comprised of approximately 19 hours of telephone
speech in two distinct languages of East Asia: Thai and Lao.

The data were collected primarily to support research and technology
evaluation in automatic language identification, and portions of these
telephone calls were used in the NIST 2011 Language Recognition Evaluation
(LRE). Participants were recruited by native speakers who contacted
acquaintances in their social network. Those native speakers made one call, up
to 15 minutes, to each acquaintance. Calls are labeled by human auditors for
callee gender, dialect type, and noise.   

LDC has also released the following as part of the Multi-Language
Conversational Telephone Speech 2011 series:
- Slavic Group (LDC2016S11)
- Turkish (LDC2017S09)
- South Asian (LDC2017S14)
- Central Asian (LDC2018S03)
- Central European (LDC2018S08)
- Spanish (LDC2018S12)
- Arabic (LDC2019S02)
- English (LDC2019S06)

Multi-Language Conversational Telephone Speech 2011 -- East Asian is
distributed via web download. 

2019 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus.
2019 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership
corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

*

(4) IARPA Babel Igbo Language Pack IARPA-babel306b-v2.0c was developed by
Appen for the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) Babel
program. It contains approximately 207 hours of Igbo conversational and
scripted telephone speech collected in 2014 and 2015 along with corresponding
transcripts.

The Igbo speech in this release represents the Owerri, Onitsha, and Ngwa
dialects spoken in Nigeria. The gender distribution among speakers is
approximately equal; speakers' ages range from 16 years to 67 years. Calls
were made using different telephones (e.g., mobile, landline) from a variety
of environments including the street, a home or office, a public place, and
inside a vehicle.

IARPA Babel Igbo Language Pack IARPA-babel306b-v2.0c is distributed via web
download. 

2019 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus provided they
have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. 2019
Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership
corpora. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

*

Membership Office
Linguistic Data Consortium
University of Pennsylvania
T: +1-215-573-1275
E: ldc at ldc.upenn.edu
M: 3600 Market St. Suite 810
Philadelphia, PA 19104

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics

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LINGUIST List: Vol-30-3149	
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