Arabic-L:LING:New LDC Arabic products

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Wed 19 Feb 2014
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject: New LDC Arabi products

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1)
Date: 19 Feb 2014
From: Linguistic Data Consortium ldc at ldc.upenn.edu
Subject: New LDC Arabi products

(1) GALE Arabic-English Parallel Aligned Treebank -- Broadcast News Part 2
was developed by LDC and contains 141,058 tokens of word aligned Arabic and
English parallel text with treebank annotations. This material was used as
training data in the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation)
program.

Parallel aligned treebanks are treebanks annotated with morphological and
syntactic structures aligned at the sentence level and the sub-sentence
level. Such data sets are useful for natural language processing and
related fields, including automatic word alignment system training and
evaluation, transfer-rule extraction, word sense disambiguation,
translation lexicon extraction and cultural heritage and cross-linguistic
studies. With respect to machine translation system development, parallel
aligned treebanks may improve system performance with enhanced syntactic
parsers, better rules and knowledge about language pairs and reduced word
error rate.

In this release, the source Arabic data was translated into English. Arabic
and English treebank annotations were performed independently. The parallel
texts were then word aligned. The material in this corpus corresponds to a
portion of the Arabic treebanked data in Arabic Treebank - Broadcast News
v1.0 (LDC2012T07).

The source data consists of Arabic broadcast news programming collected by
LDC in 2007 and 2008. All data is encoded as UTF-8. A count of files,
words, tokens and segments is below.

Language

Files

Words

Tokens

Segments

Arabic

31

110,690

141,058

7,102

The purpose of the GALE word alignment task was to find correspondences
between words, phrases or groups of words in a set of parallel texts.
Arabic-English word alignment annotation consisted of the following tasks:

Identifying different types of links: translated (correct or incorrect) and
not translated (correct or incorrect)
Identifying sentence segments not suitable for annotation, e.g., blank
segments, incorrectly-segmented segments, segments with foreign languages
Tagging unmatched words attached to other words or phrases

GALE Arabic-English Parallel Aligned Treebank -- Broadcast News Part 2 is
distributed via web download.

2014 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this
data on disc. 2014 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16
free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for US$1750.


(2) King Saud University Arabic Speech Database was developed by King Saud
University and contains 590 hours of recorded Arabic speech from male and
female speakers. The utterances include read and spontaneous speech. The
recordings were conducted in varied environments representing quiet and
noisy settings.

The corpus was designed principally for speaker recognition research. The
speech sources are sentences, word lists, prose and question and answer
sessions. Read speech text includes the following:

Sets of sentences devised to cover allophones of each phoneme, phonetic
balance, and differentiation of accents.
Word lists developed to minimize missing phonemes and to represent nasals
fricatives, commonly used words, and numbers.
Two paragraphs, one from the Quran and another from a book, selected
because they included all letters of the alphabet and were easy to read.

Spontaneous speech was captured through question and answer sessions
between participants and project team members. Speakers responded to
questions on general topics such as the weather and food.

Each speaker was recorded in three different environments: a sound proof
room, an office, and a cafeteria. The recordings were collected via
microphone and mobile phone and averaged between 16-19 minutes. The data
was verified for missing recordings, problems with the recording system or
errors in the recording process.

King Saud University Arabic Speech Database is distributed on one hard disk.

2014 Subscription Members will receive a copy of this data provided that
they have completed the User License Agreement. 2014 Standard Members may
request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members
may license this data for US$2000.
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