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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In this newsletter:

-  LDC Data Scholarship Program Deadline - January 31, 2011  -

-  Membership Discounts for MY 2011 Still Available  -

New publications:

-  ACE 2005 English SpatialML Annotations Version 2   -

-  SemEval-2010 Task 1 OntoNotes English: Coreference Resolution in Multiple Languages   -

LDC Data Scholarship Program Deadline - January 31, 2011

The deadline for the Spring 2011 LDC Data Scholarship Program is fast approaching!   Applications are now being accepted through January 31, 2011.  The LDC Data Scholarship program provides university students with access to LDC data at no-cost.  This program is open to students pursuing both undergraduate and graduate studies in an accredited college or university. LDC Data Scholarships are not restricted to any particular field of study; however, students must demonstrate a well-developed research agenda and a bona fide inability to pay. 

Students will need to complete an application which consists of a data use proposal and letter of support from their adviser.  For further information on application materials and program rules, please visit the LDC Data Scholarship page. 

Students can email their applications to the LDC Data Scholarship program. Decisions will be sent by email from the same address.

Membership Discounts for MY 2011 Still Available

If you are considering joining for Membership Year 2011 (MY2011), there is still time to save on membership fees.   Any organization which joins or renews membership for 2011 through Tuesday,  March 1, 2011, is entitled to a 5% discount on membership fees.  Organizations which held membership for MY2010 can receive a 10% discount on fees provided they renew prior to March 1, 2011.  For further information on pricing, please consult our Announcements page or contact LDC.

New Publications

(1) ACE 2005 English SpatialML Annotations Version 2 was developed by researchers at The MITRE Corporation and applies SpatialML tags to the English newswire and broadcast training data annotated for entities, relations and events in ACE 2005 Multilingual Training Corpus LDC2006T06. This second version eliminates a number of annotation inconsistencies and errors identified in ACE 2005 English SpatialML Annotations LDC2008T03. In addition, the SpatialML annotation schema has been updated from version 2.0 to version 3.0.1; the revised annotation guidelines are included in this release.

The ACE (Automatic Content Extraction) program focused on developing automatic content extraction technology to support automatic processing of human language in text form., specifically, entities, values, temporal expressions, relations and events. SpatialML is a mark-up language for representing spatial expressions in natural language documents. It is intended to emulate earlier progress on time expression such as TIMEX2, TimeML, and the 2005 ACE guidelines.

SpatialML includes syntax for marking up PLACEs mentioned in text and for linking them to data from gazetteers and other databases. LINKs are used to express relations between places, and RLINKs to capture trajectories for relative locations. To the extent possible, SpatialML leverages ISO and other standards with the goal of making the scheme compatible with existing and future corpora. SpatialML goes beyond these schemes, however, in terms of providing a richer markup for natural language that includes semantic features and relationships that allow mapping to existing resources such as gazetteers. Such markup can be useful for disambiguation, integration with mapping services and spatial reasoning.

This corpus contains 210065 total words and 17821 unique words. Counts of unique words can be found in doc/ldc_wordcount.csv which includes all words that are not part of XML markup (e.g., without tag names, attribute names or values). Unique words are counted by comparing case insensitive transformations with preceding and trailing punctuation stripped off. 'Words' consisting solely of punctuation are discarded.

The principal change in the annotation schema is that 'PATH' has been generalized to 'RLINK' for relative link. At the top level, there is now a version attribute on the root SpatialML tag to capture which version of SpatialML was used. A number of smaller changes have been made to the annotation specification; these are listed in Section 2 of the updated guidelines.

ACE 2005 English SpatialML Annotations Version 2 is distributed via web download.

2011 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus on disc.  2011 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$1000.

*

(2) SemEval-2010 Task 1 OntoNotes English: Coreference Resolution in Multiple Languages is a subset of OntoNotes Release 2.0 LDC2008T04 used in SemEval-2010 Task 1, Coreference Resolution in Multiple Languages. OntoNotes Release 2.0 consists of roughly 500,000 words of English broadcast and newswire data annotated with structural information (syntax and predicate argument structure) and shallow semantics (word sense linked to an ontology and coreference). This SemEval-2010 Task 1 release contains approximately 120,000 words extracted from the OntoNotes corpus and formatted for the SemEval task.

SemEval (Semantic Evaluation) is an ongoing series of evaluations of computational semantic analysis systems. The goal of SemEval-2010 Task 1 was to evaluate and compare automatic coreference resolution systems for six languages (Catalan, Dutch, English, German, Italian and Spanish) in four evaluation settings using four metrics. Further information about Task 1 can be found on the task description website.

The data is divided into three sets: the development set which contains 39 documents, 741 sentences and 17,044 tokens; the training set which contains 229 documents, 3,648 sentences and 79,060 tokens; and the test set  which contains 85 documents, 1,141 sentences and 24,206 tokens. The complete material for training systems is the sum of the development and training sets.

SemEval-2010 Task 1 OntoNotes English: Coreference Resolution in Multiple Languages is distributed via web download.

2011 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus on disc.  2011 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may request this data by completing a copy of the LDC User Agreement for Non-Members.  The agreement can be faxed +1 215 573 2175 or scanned and emailed to this address.  This data is available at no charge.

Ilya Ahtaridis

Membership Coordinator

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Linguistic Data Consortium                  Phone: 1 (215) 573-1275

University of Pennsylvania                    Fax: 1 (215) 573-2175

3600 Market St., Suite 810                        ldc@ldc.upenn.edu

Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA                 http://www.ldc.upenn.edu

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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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