[Corpora-List] News from LDC

Tue Nov 1 20:05:33 UTC 2011

*  Fall 2011 LDC Data Scholarships recipients
* <#scholar>

/New publications:/

LDC2011S08
*2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set * <#sre>

LDC2011T11
*Arabic Gigaword Fifth Edition * <#argig>

LDC2011T12
*Spanish Gigaword Third Edition* <#sp>

------------------------------------------------------------------------

*
**Fall 2011 LDC Data Scholarships recipients*

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.

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:

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

Please join us in congratulating our student recipients! Look for our 
upcoming announcements about the submissions deadlines for the Spring 
2012 LDC Data Scholarship program.

**

*New publications*

(1) 2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set 
<http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2011S08> 
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 2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE) 
<http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/mig/tests/spk/2008/index.html>.

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.

LDC previously released the 2008 NIST SRE Training Set in two parts as 
LDC2011S05 
<http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2011S05> 
and LDC2011S07 
<http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2011S07>.

The speech data in this release was collected in 2007 by LDC at its 
Human Subjects Data Collection Laboratories 
<http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/About/facilities.shtml> in Philadelphia and by 
the International Computer Science Institute 
<http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/> (ICSI) at the University of California, 
Berkeley. This collection was part of the Mixer 5 
<http://projects.ldc.upenn.edu/Mixer/> 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.

English language transcripts in .cfm format were produced using an 
automatic speech recognition (ASR) system.

*

(2) Arabic Gigaword Fifth Edition 
<http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2011T11> 
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 (LDC2009T30 
<http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2009T30>) plus 
new data covering the period from January 1, 2009 through December 31, 2010.

Nine distinct sources of Arabic newswire are represented in this 
distribution:

    Asharq Al-Awsat (aaw_arb)

    Agence France Presse (afp_arb)

    Al-Ahram (ahr_arb)

    Assabah (asb_arb)

    Al Hayat (hyt_arb)

    An Nahar (nhr_arb)

    Al-Quds Al-Arabi (qds_arb)

    Ummah Press (umh_arb)

    Xinhua News Agency (xin_arb)

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 ISO 639-3 
<http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/default.asp> standard.

In addition to adding new data, the following updates were made:

    Repeated documents in Asharq Al-Awsat data from 2008 were removed.

    Document formatting and docid duplication problems were corrected in
    Agence France Presse data.

    Significant duplication of content in 2007-2008 An Nahar data was
    detected, and the duplicated documents were removed.

*

(3) Spanish Gigaword Third Edition 
<http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2011T12> 
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 
(LDC2009T21 
<http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2009T21>) and 
adds data collected from January 1, 2009 through December 31, 2010.

The three distinct international sources of Spanish newswire in this 
edition, and the time spans of collection covered for each, are as follows:

    Agence France-Presse, Spanish (afp_spa) May 1994 - Dec 2010

    Associated Press, Spanish (apw_spa) Nov 1993 - Dec 2010

    Xinhua News Agency, Spanish (xin_spa) Sep 2001 - Dec 2010

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 ISO 639-3 <http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/default.asp> standard.

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.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ilya Ahtaridis
Membership Coordinator
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Linguistic Data Consortium                  Phone: 1 (215) 573-1275
University of Pennsylvania                    Fax: 1 (215) 573-2175
3600 Market St., Suite 810ldc at ldc.upenn.edu
Philadelphia, PA 19104 USAhttp://www.ldc.upenn.edu

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