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ELRA - Language Resources Catalogue - Update
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ELRA is happy to announce that 4 new Speech Resources from the GlobalPhone corpus are now available in its catalogue.
Moreover, an updated version of the Venice Italian Treebank (VIT) has also been released. 

1) New Language Resources:

The GlobalPhone Corpus: The GlobalPhone corpus was designed to provide read speech data for the development and evaluation of large continuous speech recognition systems in the most widespread languages of the world, and to provide a uniform, multilingual speech and text database for language independent and language adaptive speech recognition as well as for language identification tasks. The entire GlobalPhone corpus enables the acquisition of acoustic-phonetic knowledge of the following 19 spoken languages Arabic (ELRA-S0192), Bulgarian (ELRA-S0319), Chinese-Mandarin (ELRA-S0193), Chinese-Shanghai (ELRA-S0194), Croatian (ELRA-S0195), Czech (ELRA-S0196), French (ELRA-S0197), German (ELRA-S0198), Japanese (ELRA-S0199), Korean (ELRA-S0200), Polish (ELRA-S0320), Portuguese (Brazilian) (ELRA-S0201), Russian (ELRA-S0202), Spanish (Latin America) (ELRA-S0203), Swedish (ELRA-S0204), Tamil (ELRA-S0205), Thai (ELRA-S0321), Turkish (ELRA-S0206), Vietnamese (ELRA-S0322). In each language about 100 sentences were read from each of the 100 speakers. The read texts were selected from national newspapers available via Internet to provide a large vocabulary (up to 65,000 words). The read articles cover national and international political news as well as economic news.

Special prices are offered for a combined purchase of several GlobalPhone languages (5 languages, 10 languages, 15 languages or 19 languages).

New 4 languages are available from the GlobalPhone corpus:
ELRA-S0319 GlobalPhone Bulgarian
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1141
ELRA-S0320 GlobalPhone Polish
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1142
ELRA-S0321 GlobalPhone Thai
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1143
ELRA-S0322 GlobalPhone Vietnamese
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1144


2) Update of ELRA-W0040 Venice Italian Treebank (VIT):
The new version of VIT has a totally revised constituent-based representation and a completely new dependency-based representation which has been achieved by semi-automatic procedures.

The VIT, Venice Italian Treebank contains about 272,000 words distributed over six different domains: bureaucratic, political, economic and financial, literary, scientific, and news. In addition, some 60,000 tokens of spoken dialogues in different Italian varieties were annotated.
The annotation follows general X-bar criteria with 29 constituency labels and 102 PoS tags. VIT is also made available in a broad annotation version with 10 constituency labels and 22 PoS tags for machine learning purposes. The format is plain text with square bracketing. However, a UPenn style version which is readable by the open source query language CorpusSearch is also provided.

For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=831

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ELRA - Language Resources Catalogue - Special Offer
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ELRA is happy to announce that 2 Speecon Resources can be obtained at favourable conditions for a purchase before 31 October 2011.

ELRA-S0297 Hungarian Speecon database 
The Hungarian Speecon database comprises the recordings of 555 adult Hungarian speakers and 50 child Hungarian speakers who uttered respectively over 290 items and 210 items (read and spontaneous).
SPECIAL PRICES AVAILABLE.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1094

ELRA-S0298 Czech Speecon database
The Czech Speecon database comprises the recordings of 550 adult Czech speakers and 50 child Czech speakers who uttered respectively over 290 items and 210 items (read and spontaneous).
SPECIAL PRICES AVAILABLE.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1095


For more information on the catalogue, please contact Valérie Mapelli mailto: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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In this newsletter:

-  Cataloging the communication of Asian Elephants  -

New publications:

-  2006 NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program - Meeting Data Test Set Part 1  -

-  2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Set Part 2  -

-  French Gigaword Third Edition  -

Cataloging the communication of Asian Elephants

LDC distributes a broad selection of databases, the majority of which are used for human language research and technology development.  Our corpus catalog also includes the vocalizations of other animal species. We'd like to highlight the intriguing work behind one such animal communication corpus, Asian Elephant Vocalizations LDC2010S05.

Asian Elephant Vocalizations contains audio recordings of vocalizations by Asian Elephants (Elephas maximus) in Uda Walawe National Park, Sri Lanka.  The data was collected by Shermin de Silva as part of her doctoral thesis at the University of Pennsylvania. Recordings were made using a Fostex field recorder with a Sennheiser 'shot-gun' microphone.  In addition, de Silva utilized a second dictation microphone that allows observers to narrate what's happening without talking over the elephant recording.  The digital files were then downloaded and visualized using the Praat TextGrid Editor,  a tool originally developed for studying human speech which has since been adopted by elephant researchers.  With Praat, trained annotators are able to characterize call types and extract particular segments for later analysis. 

Until  recently, the majority of research on the behavior of wild elephants focused on one species - the African savannah elephant.  There has been comparatively less study of communication in Asian elephants, primarily because the habitat in which Asian elephants typically live makes them more difficult to study than African forest elephants. Asian and African elephants diverged from one another approximately six million years ago and  evolved separately in very distinct environments. de Silva's work has shown that Asian elephants have highly dynamic social lives, that are markedly different from that of African elephants.  Asian elephants tend to form smaller, fragmented groups on a day-to-day basis but maintain long-term pools of companions over many years.  Because communication in elephants appears to be largely socially-motivated, differences in social behavior and ecology may also be a source of differences in their vocal behavior and repertoire. 

de Silva and her colleagues study elephant communication as an opportunity to understand the evolution of social behavior and communication in a system that is very different from our own primate experience.  Human language is only one manifestation of communication in the natural world. Perhaps this is why it is fitting to place animal vocalizations side-by-side with human speech in LDC's catalog.   In this way, we can better understand how human language relates to the communicative capabilities of other species.

For further information on Shermin de Silva's current research at the Elephant Forest and Environment Conservation Trust visit:

Web:  http://elephantresearch.net
Blog: http://elephantresearch.net/fieldnotes/

New Publications

(1) 2006 NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program - Meeting Data Test Set Part 1 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 fifteen hours of meeting room video data collected in 2005 and 2006 and annotated for the VACE (Video Analysis and Content Extraction) 2006 face and person 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. In 2006, the VACE program and the European Union's Computers in the Human Interaction Loop (CHIL) collaborated to hold the CLassification of Events, Activities and Relationships (CLEAR) Evaluation. This was an international effort to evaluate systems designed to analyze people, their identities, activities, interactions and relationships in human-human interaction scenarios, as well as related scenarios. The VACE program contributed the evaluation infrastructure (e.g., data, scoring, tools) for a specific set of tasks, and the CHIL consortium, coordinated by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, contributed a separate set of evaluation infrastructure.

The meeting room data used for the 2006 test set was collected by the following sites in 2005 and 2006: Carnegie Mellon University (USA), University of Edinburgh (Scotland), IDIAP Research Institute (Switzerland), NIST (USA), Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (Netherlands) and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (USA). Each site had its own independent camera setup, illuminations, viewpoints, people and topics. Most of the datasets included High-Definition (HD) recordings, but those were subsequently formatted to MPEG-2 for the evaluation.

2006 NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program - Meeting Data Test Set Part 1 is distributed on 9 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 $2500.

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(2) 2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Set Part 2 was developed by LDC and NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology).  It contains 950 hours of multilingual telephone speech and English interview speech along with transcripts and other materials used as training data in the 2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE).  SRE is part of an ongoing series of evaluations conducted by NIST. These evaluations are an important contribution to the direction of research efforts and the calibration of technical capabilities. They are intended to be of interest to all researchers working on the general problem of text independent speaker recognition. To this end the evaluation is designed to be simple, to focus on core technology issues, to be fully supported, and to be accessible to those wishing to participate.

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.

The speech data in this release was collected in 2007 by LDC at its Human Subjects Data Collection Laboratories in Philadelphia and by the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at the University of California, Berkeley. This collection was part of the Mixer 5 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 speakers and bilingual English speakers. The telephone speech in this corpus is predominately English; all interview segments are in English. Telephone speech represents approximately 523 hours of the data,  and microphone speech represents the other 427 hours.

The telephone speech segments include summed-channel excerpts in the range of 5 minutes from longer original conversations. The interview material includes single channel conversation interview segments of at least 8 minutes from a longer interview session.  English language transcripts were produced using an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system.

2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Set Part 2 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 $2000.

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(3) French Gigaword Third Edition is a comprehensive archive of newswire text data that has been acquired over several years by LDC. This third edition updates French Gigaword Second Edition (LDC2009T28) and adds material collected from January 1, 2009 through December 31, 2010.

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

Agence France-Presse (afp_fre) May 1994 - Dec. 2010

Associated Press French Service (apw_fre) Nov. 1994 - Dec. 2010

All text data are presented in SGML form, using a very simple, minimal markup structure; all text consists of printable ASCII, white space, and printable code points in the 'Latin1 Supplement' character table, as defined by the Unicode Standard (ISO 10646) for the 'accented' characters used in French. The Supplement/accented characters are presented in UTF-8 encoding.

The overall totals for each source are summarized below. Note that the 'Totl-MB' numbers show the amount of data when the files are uncompressed (i.e. approximately 15 gigabytes, total); the 'Gzip-MB' column shows totals for compressed file sizes as stored on the DVD-ROM; the 'K-wrds' numbers are simply the number of white space-separated tokens (of all types) after all SGML tags are eliminated.

French Gigaword Third Edition is distributed on 1 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$4500.

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SpeechOcean China also has about 200+ large language resources and some of databases can be freely used to our members for academic research purpose.  As a ISCA member, we will be also glad to share these databases to other ISCA members,

www.speechocean.com

Speechocean - Language Resource Catalogue - New Released (2011-10)

Speechocean, as a global provider of language resources and data services, has more than 200 large-scale databases available 80+ languages and accents covering the fields of Text to Speech, Automatic Speech Recognition, Text, Machine Translation, Web Search, Videos, Images etc.

Speechocean is glad to announce that more Speech Resources has been released:

Turkish speech recognition Database (Desktop) --- 201 speakers 

This Turkish desktop speech recognition database was collected by Speechocean’s project team in Turkey. This database is one of our databases of Speech Data ----Desktop Project (SDD) which contains the database collections in 30 languages presently.
It contains the voices of 201 different native speakers (104 males, 97 females) who were balanced distributed by age, gender and regional accents. The script was specially designed to provide material for both training and testing for many classes of speech recognizers.  Each speaker was recorded in a quiet office environment and 300 phonetically rich sentences were randomly selected from a pool of sentences specially designed. 

All audio files are manually transcribed and labelled. A pronunciation lexicon with a phonetic transcription in SAMPA is also included.

For more information, please see the technical document at the following link:

http://www.speechocean.com/en-ASR-Corpora/789.html

Turkish speech recognition Database (In-car) --- 316 speakers

This Turkish in-car speech recognition database was collected by Speechocean’s project team in Turkey. This database is one of our databases of Speech Data---Car (SDC) Project, which contains the database collections in more than 30 languages presently.
It contains the voices of 316 different native speakers who were balanced distributed by age (mainly 16-30,31-45,46-60), gender (156males, 160 females) and regional accents.

The script was specially designed to provide material for both training and testing of many classes of speech recognizers, and contain 320 utterances covering 15 categories and 35 sub-categories for each speaker. Each speaker was recorded under two environments in three variations (Parked, City Driving and Highway driving) with kinds of recording conditions such as motor running, fan on/off, window up/down and etc. A total of 320 utterances were recorded for each speaker under two environments (160 utterances and spontaneous sentences per environment).

All audio files are manually transcribed and labelled. A pronunciation lexicon with a phonetic transcription in SAMPA is also included.

For more information, please see the technical document at the following link:

http://www.speechocean.com/en-ASR-Corpora/793.html

France French speech recognition Database (Desktop) --- 200 speakers

This France French desktop speech recognition database was collected by Speechocean’s project team in France. This database is one of our databases of Speech Data ----Desktop Project (SDD)which contains the database collections in 30 languages presently.
It contains the voices of 200 different native speakers (100 males, 100 females) who were balanced distributed by age, gender and regional accents. The script was specially designed to provide material for both training and testing for many classes of speech recognizers.  Each speaker was recorded in a quiet office environment and 500 utterances and spontaneous which includes 13 categories and about 40 sub-categories such as contact names, directory assistant names, application words, album titles, query words, etc. were recorded for each speaker.

All audio files are manually transcribed and labelled. A pronunciation lexicon with a phonetic transcription in SAMPA is also included.

For more information, please see the technical document at the following link:

http://www.speechocean.com/en-ASR-Corpora/796.html

Spain Spanish speech recognition Database (Desktop) --- 210 speakers

This Spain Spanish desktop speech recognition database was collected by Speechocean’s project team in Spain. This database is one of our databases of Speech Data ----Desktop Project (SDD) which contains the database collections in 30 languages presently. 
It contains the voices of 210 different native speakers (102males, 108 females) who were balanced distributed by age, gender and regional accents. The script was specially designed to provide material for both training and testing of many classes of speech recognizers. Each speaker were recorded in a quiet office environment and 500 utterances and spontaneous which includes 13 categories and about 40 sub-categories such as contact names, directory assistant names, application words, album titles, query words, etc. were recorded for each speaker.

All audio files are manually transcribed and labelled. A pronunciation lexicon with a phonetic transcription in SAMPA is also included.

For more information, please see the technical document at the following link:

http://www.speechocean.com/en-ASR-Corpora/795.html

UK English speech recognition Database (Desktop) --- 200 speakers

This UK English desktop speech recognition database was collected by Speechocean’s project team in UK. This database is one of our databases of Speech Data ----Desktop Project (SDD) which contains the database collections in 30 languages presently. 
It contains the voices of 200 different native speakers (106 males, 94 females) who were balanced distributed by age, gender and regional accents. The script was specially designed to provide material for both training and testing of many classes of speech recognizers, each speaker were recorded in a quiet office environment and 300 phonetically rich sentences which was randomly selected from a pool of sentences specially designed. 

All audio files are manually transcribed and labelled. A pronunciation lexicon with a phonetic transcription in SAMPA is also included.

For more information, please see the technical document at the following link:

http://www.speechocean.com/en-ASR-Corpora/792.html

Portugal Portuguese speech recognition Database (Desktop) --- 200 speakers

This Portugal Portuguese desktop speech recognition database was collected by Speechocean’s project team in Portugal. This database is one of our databases of Speech Data ----Desktop Project (SDD) which contains the database collections in 30 languages presently.
It contains the voices of 200 different native speakers (101 males, 99 females) who were balanced distributed by age, gender and regional accents. The script was specially designed to provide material for both training and testing of many classes of speech recognizers, each speaker were recorded in a quiet office environment and 300 phonetically rich sentences which was randomly selected from a pool of sentences specially designed. 

All audio files are manually transcribed and labelled. A pronunciation lexicon with a phonetic transcription in SAMPA is also included.

For more information, please see the technical document at the following link:

http://www.speechocean.com/en-ASR-Corpora/791.html

Swedish speech recognition Database (Desktop) --- 200 speakers

This Swedish desktop speech recognition database was collected by Speechocean’s project team in Sweden. This database is one of our databases of Speech Data ----Desktop Project (SDD) which contains the database collections in 30 languages presently.
It contains the voices of 200 different native speakers (118 males, 82 females) who were balanced distributed by age, gender and regional accents. The script was specially designed to provide material for both training and testing of many classes of speech recognizers, each speaker will be recorded in a quiet office environment and 300 phonetically rich sentences which was randomly selected from a pool of sentences specially designed. 

All audio files are manually transcribed and labelled. A pronunciation lexicon with a phonetic transcription in SAMPA is also included.

For more information, please see the technical document at the following link:

http://www.speechocean.com/en-ASR-Corpora/790.html

Canadian French Desktop speech recognition Corpus (200 speakers) was launched in Canada

Based on our client's urgent demands, the Canadian French desktop speech recognition database (200 speakers) was collected by Speechocean’s project team in Canada. This database belongs to Speechocean's Desktop Speech Data Project.
It contains the voices of 200 different native speakers (100males, 100females) who were balanced distributed by age, gender and regional accents. The script was specially designed to provide material for both training and testing of many classes of speech recognizers. Each speaker were recorded in a quiet office environment and 500 utterances and spontaneous were recorded for each speaker.

All audio files are manually transcribed and labelled. A pronunciation lexicon with a phonetic transcription in SAMPA is also included.

 For more information, please see the technical document at the following link:

http://www.speechocean.com/en-ASR-Corpora/733.html

Chinese Mandarin In-car Speech Recognition Database was Successful Released!

Chinese Mandarin In-car Speech Recognition Database was successfully released with the catalogue serial number of King-ASR-122 in our Catalogue. This database was made for the tuning and testing purpose of speech recognition system for car-using. It belongs to SPC’s Multi-language In-car Speech Data Project. 
The Database which were collected in China Mainland, contains the voices of 100 different native speakers (50males, 50females) who were balanced according by age(mainly 18 – 30（62），31 – 45（28）,46 – 60（10）), gender (Male50%, Female50%) and regional accents (Northern60%, Wu10%, Xiang5%, Gan5%, Kejia 5%, Min5%, Cantonese10%).

The script was specially designed to provide material for both training and testing of many classes of speech recognizers which contain 320 utterances covering 15 categories and 35 sub-categories for each speaker.
Each speaker was recorded under two environments in three variations (Parked, City Driving and Highway driving) with various kinds of recording conditions such as motor running, fan on/off, window up/down, etc. In total, 320 utterances were recorded for each speaker under two environments (160 utterances and spontaneous sentences per environment) 

All audio files are manually transcribed and labelled. A pronunciation lexicon with a phonetic transcription in SAMPA is also included.

For more information, please see the technical document at the following link:

http://www.speechocean.com/en-ASR-Corpora/781.html

The American Spanish Mobile speech Recognition database was Successful Released!

The American Spanish Mobile speech Recognition database was successfully released with the catalogue serial number of King-ASR-119. This database was made for the tuning and testing purpose of speech recognition system for IVR / mobile. It belongs to SPC’s Multi-language Mobile Speech Data Project. 
The database which was collected in America, contains the voices of 40 different native speakers (21 males, 19 females) who were balanced according to age (mainly 16-30,31-45,46-60), gender and regional accents.

All audio files are manually transcribed and labelled. A pronunciation lexicon with a phonetic transcription in SAMPA is also included.

For more information, please see the technical document at the following link:

http://www.speechocean.com/en-ASR-Corpora/779.html

Visit our on-line Catalogue: http://www.speechocean.com/en-Product-Catalogue/Index.html

For more information about our Database and Services please visit our website www.Speechocen.com

If you have any inquiry regarding our databases and service please feel free to contact us:

XiangFeng Cheng mailto:Chengxianfeng@speechocean.com

Marta Gherardi mailto:Marta@speechocean.com

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