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ISCApad #161 |
Monday, November 07, 2011 by Chris Wellekens |
5-2-1 | ELRA - Language Resources Catalogue - Update (2011-09) *****************************************************************
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5-2-2 | ELRA - Language Resources Catalogue - Special Offer *****************************************************************
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5-2-3 | LDC Newsletter (October 2011) In this newsletter: Fall 2011 LDC Data Scholarships recipients New publications: LDC2011S08 LDC2011T11 LDC2011T12
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.
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.
LDC at NWAV 2011 NWAV’s 40th Anniversary Conference will be hosted by Georgetown University from October 27-30 and LDC will be on-hand to celebrate! Please stop by the LDC exhibition at any point during the main conference and be sure to attend LDC’s pre-conference workshop on “Demographic Coding for Sociolinguistic Corpus Archive Preparation” from 4.00 – 6.00 pm on Thursday, October 27. This workshop will be hosted by LDC Executive Director Christopher Cieri and Malcah Yaeger-Dror of the University of Arizona. It has two stated goals:
NWAV registration options can be found here. We hope to see you there! Please visit LDC’s Facebook page to follow our conference activities. New publications (1) 2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set 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). 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 and LDC2011S07. 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 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. 2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set is distributed on 9 DVD-ROM. * (2) Arabic Gigaword Fifth Edition 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) 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:
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 standard. In addition to adding new data, the following updates were made:
Arabic Gigaword Fifth 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$6000. * (3) Spanish Gigaword Third Edition 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) 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:
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 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. Spanish 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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5-2-4 | Speechocean November 2011 update 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 in 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: Canadian French Speech Recognition Database - Sentences (Desktop) -- 200 speakers This Canadian French speech recognition database was collected by Speechocean’s project team in Canada. It contains the voices of 200 different native speakers who were demographic balanced according age distribution (mainly 16 – 30, 31 – 45, 46 – 60), gender (50±5% Males, 50±5% Females) and regional accents. A script pool with a total of 20,000 simple sentences was phonetically designed for both training and testing of speech recognizers. Each speaker has recorded 300 sentences which were randomly selected from the script pool. All speakers have been recorded in a quiet office room through two professional microphones. Each prompted utterance is stored in a separate file and each signal file is accompanied by an ASCII SAM label file which contains the relevant descriptive information. For more information, please see the technical document at the following link: http://www.speechocean.com/en-ASR-Corpora/616.html
UK English Speech Recognition Database ---- Sentences (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 for 30 languages presently. For more information, please see the technical document at the following link: http://www.speechocean.com/en-ASR-Corpora/792.html
UK TTS Speech database (Female) The UK English Speech Corpus consists in one native UK Female professional broadcaster (Female, 32 years old) recorded in a studio with high SNR (>35dB) over two channels (AKG C4000B microphone and Electroglottography (EGG) sensor). For more information, please see the technical document at the following link: http://www.speechocean.com/en-TTS-Corpora/799.html
US TTS speech database (Female) The US English Speech Corpus consists in one native US Female professional broadcaster (Female, 32 years old) recorded in a studio with high SNR (>35dB) over two channels (AKG C4000B microphone and Electroglottography (EGG) sensor).
Italian TTS speech database (Female) The Italian Speech Corpus consists in one native Italian Female professional broadcaster (Female, 32 years old) recorded in a studio with high SNR (>35dB) over two channels (AKG C4000B microphone and Electroglottography (EGG) sensor).
For more information about our Database and Services please visit our website www.Speechocen.com or visit our on-line Catalogue at http://www.speechocean.com/en-Product-Catalogue/Index.html If you have any inquiry regarding our databases and service please feel free to contact us: Xianfeng Cheng mailto: Chengxianfeng@speechocean.com Marta Gherardi mailto: Marta@speechocean.com
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5-2-5 | Nominations for the Antonio Zampoli Prize (ELRA) The ELRA Board has created a prize to honour the memory of its first President, Professor Antonio Zampolli, a pioneer and visionary scientist
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