I received this very good news from Joseph P. Campbell (MIT Lincoln
Laboratory):

The entire Bell System Technical Journal from 1922--1983 is now
available on line! It is offered in PDF format sorted by year, volume, and
issue; and it is searchable:

http://bstj.bell-labs.com/

BSTJ holds a wealth of consolidated information of outstanding contributions
from Bell Labs over the years. For example, check out Fletcher's 1922
article 'The Nature of Speech and Its Interpretation', BSTJ, vol 1, no 1.
Also see Shannon's landmark paper and much, much more!

As Joe pointed out, the current generation of researchers didn't grow up
with BSTJs under their bed like we both did, but for the older generation
that remembers these great articles, this is indeed very good news.

--Isabel Trancoso

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- 

Early Renewal Discounts for Membership Year (MY) 2011  -

New publications:

LDC2010T13
-  Arabic Treebank: Part 1 v 4.1  -

LDC2010T21
-  NIST 2008 Open Machine Translation (OpenMT) Evaluation -

Early Renewal Discounts for Membership Year (MY) 2011

LDC values the significant contribution LDC members make through their continued support of the consortium.  We would like to invite new members, as well as all current and previous members of LDC, to renew for Membership Year (MY) 2011.  For MY2011, LDC is pleased to maintain membership fees at last year’s rates – membership fees will not increase.  Additionally, for the third straight year, LDC will extend discounts on membership fees to members who keep their membership current and who join early in the year.

The details of our Early Renewal Discounts for MY2011 are as follows:

• Organizations who joined for MY2010, will receive a 5% discount when renewing. This discount will apply throughout 2011, regardless of time of renewal. MY2010 members renewing before March 1, 2011 will receive an additional 5% discount, for a total 10% discount off the membership fee.
• New members as well as organizations who did not join for MY2010, but who held membership in any of the previous MYs (1993-2009), will also be eligible for a 5% discount provided that they join/renew before March 1, 2011.

The following table provides exact pricing information.

*  For new members, MY2010 Members renewing for MY2011, and any previous year Member who renews before March 1, 2011


** For MY2010 Members renewing before March 1, 2011


Publications for MY2011 are still being planned and here are the working titles of data sets we intend to provide:

 
In addition to receiving new publications, current year members of the LDC also enjoy the benefit of licensing older data at reduced costs; current year for-profit members may use most data for commercial applications.

This past year, the LDC members who joined early or kept their membership current saved almost US$60,000 collectively on membership fees.  In fact, almost 90% of our members for MY2010 didn't pay full price for membership! Be sure to keep an eye on your mail - all previous and current LDC members have been sent an invitation to join letter and renewal invoice for MY2011.  Renew early for MY2011 to save today!



 

New Publications

(1) Arabic Treebank: Part 1 v 4.1 was developed at LDC. It consists of 734 newswire  stories from Agence France Presse with part-of-speech , morphology, gloss and syntactic treebank annotation in accordance with the Penn Arabic Treebank (PATB) Guidelines developed in 2008 and 2009. This release represents a significant revision of LDC's previous ATB1 publications: Arabic Treebank: Part 1 v 2.0 (LDC2003T06) and Arabic Treebank: Part 1 v 3.0 (POS with full vocalization + syntactic analysis) (LDC2005T02).

The ongoing PATB project supports research in Arabic-language natural language processing and human language technology development. The methodology and work leading to the release of this publication are described in detail in the documentation accompanying this corpus and in two research papers: Enhancing the Arabic Treebank: A Collaborative Effort toward New Annotation Guidelines and Consistent and Flexible Integration of Morphological Annotation in the Arabic Treebank.

ATB1 v 4.1 contains a total of 145,386 tokens before clitics are split, and 167,280 tokens after clitics are separated for the treebank annotation.  Arabic Treebank: Part 1 v 4.1 is distributed on one DVD-ROM.

2010 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus.  2010 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$4500.

*

(2) NIST 2008 Open Machine Translation (OpenMT) Evaluation is a package containing source data, reference translations and scoring software used in the NIST 2008 OpenMT evaluation. It is designed to help evaluate the effectiveness of machine translation systems. The package was compiled and scoring software was developed by researchers at NIST, making use of broadcast, newswire and web data and reference translations collected and developed by LDC.

The 2008 task was to evaluate translation from Arabic to English, Chinese to English, English to Chinese (newswire only) and Urdu to English. Selected human reference translations and system translations for the NIST MT08 test sets are contained in NIST Open Machine Translation 2008 Evaluation (MT08) Selected Reference and System Translations LDC2010T01.
 
This release contains of 494 documents with corresponding sets of four separate human expert reference translations. The source data is comprised of Arabic, Chinese, English and Urdu news wire, broadcast and weblog and newsgroup data collected by LDC in 2007. The news wire and broadcast material are from Asharq Al-Awsat (Arabic), Agence France-Presse (Arabic, Chinese, English), Al-Ahram (Arabic), Al Hayat (Arabic), Assabah (Arabic), An Nahar (Arabic), Al-Quds Al-Arabi (Arabic), Xinhua News Agency (Arabic, Chinese, English), Central News Service (Chinese), Guangming Daily (Chinese), People's Daily (Chinese), People's Liberation Army Daily (Chinese), British Broadcasting Corporation (Urdu), Daily Jang (Urdu), Pakistan News Service (Urdu), Voice of America (Urdu), Associated Press (English), New York Times (English) and Los Angeles Times/Washington Post Newswire Service (English).

This evaluation kit includes a single Perl script (mteval-v11b.pl) that may be used to produce a translation quality score for one (or more) MT systems.
 
Additional information about these evaluations may be found at the NIST Open Machine Translation (OpenMT) Evaluation web site.

NIST 2008 Open Machine Translation (OpenMT) Evaluation is distributed via web download.

2010 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus on disc.  2010 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$150.

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 ELDA Distribution Campaign 2010
*****************************************************************

ELDA is launching a special distribution campaign offering very favorable conditions for the language resources acquisition,
including discounts on public prices, from the ELRA Catalogue of Language Resources (see http://catalog.elra.info).

This offer will be open until the end of December 2010.
 
For more information on this offer, please contact Valérie Mapelli (mapelli@elda.org)

Visit our On-line Catalogue: http://catalog.elra.info
Visit the Universal Catalogue: http://universal.elra.info
Archives of ELRA Language Resources Catalogue Updates: http://www.elra.info/LRs-Announcements.html

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