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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:

  Fall 2011 LDC Data Scholarships recipients

 LDC data - now on Blu-ray

  LDC at NWAV 2011 

New publications:

LDC2011S08
2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set

LDC2011T11
Arabic Gigaword Fifth Edition 

LDC2011T12
Spanish Gigaword Third Edition

Fall 2011 LDC Data Scholarships recipients

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.  

LDC received many strong applications from students attending universities across the globe.  We've reviewed all the applications, and after careful consideration, we have selected four scholarship recipients!   These students will receive no-cost copies of LDC data:

Haris B C - Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (India), Electronics & Electrical Engineering.  Haris has been awarded a copy of 2005 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Data (LDC2011S01) and 2005 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Data (LDC2011S04) to evaluate the performance of a sparse representation speaker verification system.

Friðjón Guðjohnsen - Reykjavik University (Iceland), Computer Science.  Friðjón has been awarded a copy of Treebank-3 (LDC99T42) to be used in the development of tagging methods to improve the accuracy of tagging Icelandic texts.

Leili Javadpour - Louisiana State University (USA), Engineering Science.  Leili has been awarded a copy of BBN Pronoun Coreference and Entity Type Corpus (LDC2005T33) and Message Understanding Conference (MUC) 7 (LDC2001T02) for her work in pronominal anaphora resolution.

Jad Makhlouta - American University of Beirut (Lebanon), Electrical and Computer Engineering.  Jad has been awarded a copy of LDC Standard Arabic Morphological Analyzer (SAMA) Version 3.1 (LDC2010L01) for his work in Arabic text mining.

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 data - now on Blu-ray!

LDC is pleased to announce that the Blu-ray revolution has come to linguistic data!  We are now offering select databases on Blu-ray Disc (BD).  With BD, we'll be able to distribute some of our larger databases using a smaller number of discs.   BDs also have the potential to be read more quickly than DVDs, which means faster access to data.  To introduce our Blu-ray option, we would like to announce that the following databases will now be distributed on BD in addition to DVD-ROM:

LDC2011T07 English Gigaword Fifth Edition, now available on 1 Blu-ray Disc

LDC2006T13 Web 1T 5-gram Version 1, now available on 2 Blu-ray Discs

Organizations with licenses to English Gigaword Fifth Edition will be given the opportunity to 'swap' their DVDs for BDs.  New licensees for Web 1T 5-gram have the option to select BD or DVD media.

We expect to extend the BD option over time to other corpora in the catalog and to new releases.

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:

1) to catalog the need for more detailed demographic categories based on field experience that other researchers can and should exploit both for their own immediate analyses, and to facilitate sharing among research groups, and

 2) to encourage the use of a core set of demographic metadata coding options.

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.

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) 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:

Asharq Al-Awsat (aaw_arb)

Agence France Presse (afp_arb)

Al-Ahram (ahr_arb)

Assabah (asb_arb)

Al Hayat (hyt_arb)

An Nahar (nhr_arb)

Al-Quds Al-Arabi (qds_arb)

Ummah Press (umh_arb)

Xinhua News Agency (xin_arb)

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:

Repeated documents in Asharq Al-Awsat data from 2008 were removed.

Document formatting and docid duplication problems were corrected in Agence France Presse  data.

Significant duplication of content in 2007-2008 An Nahar data was detected, and the duplicated documents were removed.

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.

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(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:

Agence France-Presse, Spanish (afp_spa) May 1994 - Dec 2010

Associated Press, Spanish (apw_spa) Nov 1993 - Dec 2010

Xinhua News Agency, Spanish (xin_spa) Sep 2001 - Dec 2010

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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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.
A pronunciation lexicon with a phonemic SAMPA transcription is also included.

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. 
It contains the voices of 200 different native speakers who were balanced distributed by age (mainly 16 – 30,31 – 45,46 – 60), gender (106 males, 94 females) and regional accents (for the details, please see the technical document).The script was specially designed to provide material for both training and testing of many classes of speech recognizers. Each speaker has been recorded in a quiet office environment and 300 phonetically rich sentences were randomly selected from a pool of sentences specially designed. 
The speech data are stored as sequences of 48.1 kHz, 16 bit and uncompressed. A pronunciation lexicon with a phonemic transcription in SAMPA is also included. The pure recording hours are 189.1. And the phoneme labelling of 6843 sentences (100034 words) which were chosen from 24 speakers were manually made.

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).
The Corpus includes the following sub-corpora: 
1. Sentence sub-corpus: including 3000 short sentences (7~12 words) and 2000 sentences with normal length (13~20 words). Considering all kinds of linguistic phenomena, all sentences were extracted from the daily articles in England, such as national and international news, papers about life, travel, and so on. The sentences with political/religious/obscene/pornographic words which might lead to negative emotions were carefully excluded.
2. Emotional sub-corpus: including 100 exclamatory sentences and 100 interrogative sentences which can be used for emotional TTS study; 
3. Digit sub-corpus: including many kinds of digits data, such as isolated digit, connected digits with blocks, natural and ordinal number readings; 
4. Expression sub-corpus: consists of general expressions, such as date, time, money and measure expression; 
5. Spell sub-corpus: including characters in alphabet, Greek characters and general abbreviations; All reading prompts are manually revised and prosody annotations were made according to real speech. 
All speech data are segmented and labeled on phone level. Pronunciation lexicon and pitch extract from EEG can also be provided based on demands.

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).
The Corpus includes the following sub-corpora: 
1. Sentence sub-corpus: including 3000 short sentences (7~12 words) and 2000 sentences with normal length (13~20 words). Considering all kinds of linguistic phenomena, all sentences were extracted from the daily articles in the Usa, such as national and international news, papers about life, travel, and so on. The sentences with political/religious/obscene/pornographic words which might lead to negative emotions were carefully excluded.
2. Emotional sub-corpus: including 100 exclamatory sentences and 100 interrogative sentences which can be used for emotional TTS study; 
3. Digit sub-corpus: including many kinds of digits data, such as isolated digit, connected digits with blocks, natural and ordinal number readings; 
4. Expression sub-corpus: consists of general expressions, such as date, time, money and measure expression; 
5. Spell sub-corpus: including characters in alphabet, Greek characters and general abbreviations; All reading prompts are manually revised and prosody annotations were made according to real speech. 
All speech data are segmented and labeled on phone level. Pronunciation lexicon and pitch extract from EEG can also be provided based on demands.

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).
The Corpus includes the following sub-corpora: 
1. Sentence sub-corpus: including 3000 short sentences (7~12 words) and 2000 sentences with normal length (13~20 words). Considering all kinds of linguistic phenomena, all sentences were extracted from the daily articles in Italy, such as national and international news, papers about life, travel, and so on. The sentences with political/religious/obscene/pornographic words which might lead to negative emotions were carefully excluded.
2. Emotional sub-corpus: including 100 exclamatory sentences and 100 interrogative sentences which can be used for emotional TTS study; 
3. Digit sub-corpus: including many kinds of digits data, such as isolated digit, connected digits with blocks, natural and ordinal number readings; 
4. Expression sub-corpus: consists of general expressions, such as date, time, money and measure expression; 
5. Spell sub-corpus: including characters in alphabet, Greek characters and general abbreviations; All reading prompts are manually revised and prosody annotations were made according to real speech. 
All speech data are segmented and labeled on phone level. Pronunciation lexicon and pitch extract from EEG can also be provided based on demands.

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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The ELRA Board has created a prize to honour the memory of its first President, Professor Antonio Zampolli, a pioneer and visionary scientist
who was internationally recognized in the field of computational linguistics and Human Language Technologies (HLT). He also contributed
much through the establishment of ELRA and the LREC conference.

To reflect Antonio Zampolli's specific interest in our field, the Prize will be awarded to individuals whose work lies within the areas of
Language Resources and Language Technology Evaluation with acknowledged contributions to their advancements.

The Prize will be awarded for the fifth time in May 2012 at the LREC 2012 conference in Istanbul (21-27 May 2012 ). Completed nominations should
be sent to the ELRA President Stelios Piperidis @ AntonioZampolli-Prize@elra.info no later than February 1st, 2012.
 

On behalf of the ELRA Board
Stelios Piperidis
President

Please visite ELRA web site for the Antonio Zampolli Prize Statutes and the nomination procedure:  http://www.elra.info/Antonio-Zampolli-Prize.html

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