In this newsletter:

-  Early Renewing Members Save Again!  -

New Publications:

LDC2011S01
-   NIST 2005 Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Data  -

LDC2011V03
-  NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program - Meeting Data Test Set Part 3  -

Early Renewing Members Save Again!

Once again, LDC's early renewal discount program has resulted in significant savings for our members! For Membership Year (MY) 2011, about 120 organizations that renewed membership or joined early received a discount on their membership fees. Taken together, these members saved almost US$70,000! MY 2010 members are reminded that they are still eligible for a 5% discount when renewing. This discount will apply throughout 2011, regardless of time of renewal.

By joining for MY 2011, any organization can take advantage of membership benefits including free membership year data as well as discounts on older LDC corpora.  Please visit our Members FAQ for further information.

New Publications

(1) 2005 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Data was developed at LDC and NIST (National Insitute of Standards and Technology). It consists of  392 hours of conversational telephone speech in English, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Russian and Spanish and associated English transcripts used as training data in the NIST-sponsored 2005 Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE). The ongoing series of SRE yearly evaluations conducted by NIST are intended to be of interest to researchers working on the general problem of text independent speaker recognition. To that end the evaluations are designed to be simple, to focus on core technology issues, to be fully supported and to be accessible to those wishing to participate.

The task of the 2005 SRE evaluation was speaker detection, that is, to determine whether a specified speaker is speaking during a given segment of conversational speech. The task was divided into 20 distinct and separate tests involving one of five training conditions and one of four test conditions.

The speech data consists of conversational telephone speech with 'multi-channel' data collected simultaneously from a number of auxiliary microphones. The files are organized into two segments: 10 second two-channel excerpts (continuous segments from single conversations that are estimated to contain approximately 10 seconds of actual speech in the channel of interest) and 5 minute two-channel conversations.

The speech files are stored as 8-bit u-law speech signals in separate SPHERE files. In addition to the standard header fields, the SPHERE header for each file contains some auxiliary information that includes the language of the conversation and whether the data was recorded over a telephone line.

English language word transcripts in .cmt format were produced using an automatic speech recognition system (ASR) and contain error rates in the range of 15-30%.

2005 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Data is distributed on 6 DVD-ROM.

2011 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2011 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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(2) NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program - Meeting Data Test Set Part 3, Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) catalog number LDC2011V03 and isbn 1-58563-579-0, was developed by researchers at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Florida (USF), Tampa, Florida and the Multimodal Information Group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). It contains approximately eleven hours of meeting room video data collected in 2001 and 2002 at NIST's Meeting Data Collection Laboratory and annotated for the VACE (Video Analysis and Content Extraction) 2005 face, person and hand detection and tracking tasks.
 
The VACE program was established to develop novel algorithms for automatic video content extraction, multi-modal fusion, and event understanding. During VACE Phases I and II, the program made significant progress in the automated detection and tracking of moving objects including faces, hands, people, vehicles and text in four primary video domains: broadcast news, meetings, street surveillance, and unmanned aerial vehicle motion imagery. Initial results were also obtained on automatic analysis of human activities and understanding of video sequences.

Three performance evaluations were conducted under the auspices of the VACE program between 2004 and 2007.  The 2005 evaluation was administered by USF in collaboration with NIST and guided by an advisory forum including the evaluation participants. A summary of results of the evaluation can be found in the 2005 VACE results and analysis paper included in this release.

NIST's Meeting Data Collection Laboratory is designed to collect corpora to support research, development and evaluation in meeting recognition technologies. It is equipped to look and sound like a conventional meeting space. The data collection facility includes five Sony EV1-D30 video cameras, four of which have stationary views of a center conference table (one view from each surrounding wall) with a fixed focus and viewing angle, and an additional 'floating' camera which is used to focus on particular participants, whiteboard or conference table depending on the meeting forum. The data is captured in a NIST-internal file format. The video data was extracted from the NIST format and encoded using the MPEG-2 standard in NTSC format. Further information concerning the video data parameters can found in the documentation included with this corpus.

NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program - Meeting Data Test Set Part 3 is distributed on 7 DVD-ROM.

2011 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2011 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$2500.