[Corpora-List] New LDC Publications

Wed Feb 1 21:48:01 UTC 2006

LDC2006T02
*Arabic Gigaword Second Edition* 
<http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2006T02>
*
*LDC2006S01*
CSLU:  Voices 
<http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2006S01>*

LDC2006T04*
**Multiple Translation Chinese (MTC) Part 4 
<http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2006T04>
*

The Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) would is please to announce the 
availability of three new publications.

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*New LDC Publications

*

(1)  Arabic Gigaword Second Edition 
<http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2006T02> 
is is a comprehensive archive of newswire text data that has been 
acquired from Arabic news sources by the Linguistic Data Consortium 
(LDC).  Arabic Gigaword Second Edition includes all of the content of 
the first edition of Arabic Gigaword (LDC2003T12) as well as new data.

Arabic Gigaword contains five distinct sources of Arabic newswire

	Agence France Presse 	(afp_arb; formally afa)

	Al Hayat News Agency 	(hyt_arb; formally alh)

	An Nahar News Agency 	(nhr_arb; formally ann)

	Ummah Press 	(umh_arb)

	Xinhua News Agency 	(xin_arb; formally xia)

The seven-letter codes in the parentheses above consist of the 
three-character source name IDs and the three-character language code 
("arb") separated by an underscore ("_") character. The three-letter 
language code represents the standard Arabic in the ISO 639-3 standard. 
In the first edition of the Arabic Gigaword corpus, a simpler 
three-character-code scheme was used to identify both the source and the 
language. The new convention allows us to distinguish data sets by 
source and language more naturally when a single newswire provider 
distributes data in multiple languages.

Ummah Press is a new source added to the Second Edition. The following 
table shows the new data that appear for the first time in the Second 
Edition.

	Agence France Presse 	2003.01-2004.12 	143766 documents

	Al Hayat News Agency 	2002.01-2003.12 	64308 documents

	An Nahar News Agency 	2003.01-2004.01 	16316 documents

	Ummah Press 	2003.01-2004.12 	4641 documents

	Xinhua News Agency 	2003.06-2004.12 	106236 documents

There are 423 files, totaling approximately 1.4GB in compressed form 
(5359 MB uncompressed and 1591983 K-words). 

*

(2)  The CSLU: Voices 
<http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2006S01> 
corpus contains 12 speakers reading 50 phonetically rich sentences. The 
recording procedure involved a "mimicking" approach which resulted in a 
high degree of natural time-alignment between different speakers. The 
acoustic wave and the concurrent laryngograph signal were recorded for 1 
"free" and 2 "mimicked" renditions of each sentence. Pitch marks, 
calculated from the laryngograph signal, and time marks, the output of a 
forced-alignment algorithm, have been added to the corpus. 

*

(3)  Multiple-Translation Chinese (MTC) Part 4 
<http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2006T04> 
supports the development of automatic means for evaluating translation 
quality.  The LDC was sponsored to solicit four sets of human 
translations for a single set of Chinese source materials. The LDC was 
also asked to produce translations from various 
commercial-off-the-shelf-systems (COTS, including commercial Machine 
Translation (MT) systems as well as MT systems available on the 
Internet). There are a total of five sets of COTS outputs, and six 
output sets from TIDES 2003 MT Evaluation participants.

To see if automatic evaluation systems, such as BLEU, track human 
assessment, the LDC has also performed human assessment on one COTS 
output and the 6 TIDES research systems. The corpus includes the 
assessment results for one of the 5 COTS systems, the assessment result 
for the 6 TIDES research systems, and the specifications used for 
conducting the assessments.

Multiple-Translation Chinese (MTC) Part 4 contains two sources of 
journalistic Chinese text:

- Xinhua News Agency: 50 news stories
- AFP News Service: 50 news stories

There are 100 source files, and 1,100 translation files. All source data 
were drawn from LDC's January and February 2003 collection of Xinhua 
news Chinese data and AFP Chinese data.  For the Chinese data, there are 
approximately 21K-words, while for the English translations, there are 
396K-words in total and 16K unique words. 

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If you need further information, or would like to inquire about 
membership to the LDC, please email ldc at ldc.upenn.edu or call +1 215 573 
1275.

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Linguistic Data Consortium                     Phone: (215) 573-1275
University of Pennsylvania                       Fax: (215) 573-2175
3600 Market St., Suite 810                         ldc at ldc.upenn.edu
Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA                  http://www.ldc.upenn.edu

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