| | In this newsletter:
Spring 2012 LDC Data Scholarship Program
Invitation to Join for Membership Year (MY) 2012
Why become an LDC member?
LDC to close for Thanksgiving Break
New publications:
LDC2011S09
2006 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Set
LDC2011V06
2006 NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program - Meeting Data Test Set Part 2
LDC2011T13
Chinese Gigaword Fifth Edition
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Spring 2012 LDC Data Scholarship Program
Applications are now being accepted through January 15, 2012 for the Spring 2012 LDC Data Scholarship program! 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. The selection process is highly competitive.
The application consists of two parts:
(1) Data Use Proposal. Applicants must submit a proposal describing their intended use of the data. The proposal must contain the applicant's name, university, and field of study. The proposal should state which data the student plans to use and contain a description of their research project.
Applicants should consult the LDC Corpus Catalog for a complete list of data distributed by LDC. Due to certain restrictions, a handful of LDC corpora are restricted to members of the Consortium. Applicants are advised to select a maximum of one to two data sets; students may apply for additional data sets during the following cycle once they have completed processing of the initial data sets and publish or present work in some juried venue.
(2) Letter of Support. Applicants must submit one letter of support from their thesis adviser or department chair. The letter must confirm that the department or university lacks the funding to pay the full Non-member Fee for the data and verify the student's need for data.
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.
The deadline for the Spring 2012 program cycle is January 15, 2012.
Invitation to join for Membership Year (MY) 2012
Membership Year (MY) 2012, our 20th Anniversary Year, is open for joining! We would like to invite all current and previous members of LDC to renew their membership as well as welcome new organizations to join the consortium. For MY2012, LDC is pleased to maintain membership fees at last year’s rates – membership fees will not increase. Additionally, LDC will extend discounts on membership fees to members who keep their membership current and who join early in the year.
The details of our early renewal discounts for MY2012 are as follows:
· Organizations who joined for MY2011 will receive a 5% discount when renewing. This discount will apply throughout 2012, regardless of time of renewal. MY2011 members renewing before March 1, 2012 will receive an additional 5% discount, for a total 10% discount off the membership fee.
· New members as well as organizations who did not join for MY2011, but who held membership in any of the previous MYs (1993-2010), will also be eligible for a 5% discount provided that they join/renew before March 1, 2012.
The following table provides exact pricing information.
MY2012 Fee
MY2012 Fee
with 5% Discount*
MY2012 Fee
with 10% Discount**
Not-for-Profit /US Government
Standard
US$2400
US$2280
US$2160
Subscription
US$3850
US$3658
US$3465
For-Profit
Standard
US$24000
US$22800
US$21600
Subscription
US$27500
US$26125
US$24750
* For new members, MY2011 Members renewing for MY2012, and any previous year Member who renews before March 1, 2012
** For MY2011 Members renewing before March 1, 2012
Publications for MY2012 are still being planned; here are the working titles of data sets we intend to provide:
· ARRAU 1.2 (Anaphor Resolution and Underspecification)
· TORGO Dysarthic Speech
· Arabic Treebank BN (broadcast news)
· GALE data – all phases and tasks
· Digital Archive of Southern Speech
· Chinese Dependency Treebank
In addition to receiving new publications, current year members of the LDC also enjoy the benefit of licensing older data at reduced costs; current year for-profit members may use most data for commercial applications.
This past year, LDC members who joined early or kept their membership current saved almost US$70,000 collectively on membership fees. Be sure to keep an eye on your mail - all previous and current LDC members will be sent an invitation to join letter and renewal invoice for MY2012. Renew early for MY2012 to save today!
Why become an LDC member?
LDC is offering early renewal discounts on membership fees for Membership Year 2012 making now a good time to consider joining or renewing membership. LDC membership has the following advantages:
•LDC membership provides cost-effective access to an extensive and growing catalog that spans 20 years and includes over 500 multilingual speech, text, and video resources. Even if your organization only needs a few datasets from a given membership year, membership is often the most economical way to obtain current corpora. Additionally, the generous discounts that member organizations receive on older corpora reduce the cost of acquiring such datasets.
•All members enjoy unlimited use of LDC data within their organizations. For universities, there is no difference in cost between a departmental membership and one that is university-wide. Departments can therefore combine resources and establish one LDC membership for use by the entire university community. Likewise, for-profit members with multiple branches can maintain one membership for use by their entire organization.
For-profit organizations are reminded that an LDC membership is a pre-requisite for obtaining a commercial license to almost all LDC databases. Non-member organizations, including non-member for-profit organizations, cannot use LDC data to develop or test products for commercialization, nor can they use LDC data in any commercial product or for any commercial purpose. LDC data users should consult corpus-specific license agreements for limitations, including commercial restrictions, on the use of certain corpora. In the case of a small group of corpora, commercial licenses must be obtained separately from the owners of the data.
LDC to Close for Thanksgiving Break
LDC would like to inform our customers that we will be closed on Thursday, November 24, 2011 and Friday, November 25, 2011 in observance of the US Thanksgiving Holiday. Our offices will reopen on Monday, November 28, 2011.
New Publications
(1) 2006 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Set was developed by LDC and NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). It contains 595 hours of conversational telephone speech in English, Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Hindi, Korean, Russian, Thai and Urdu and associated English transcripts used as training data in the NIST-sponsored 2006 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.
The task of the 2006 SRE evaluation was speaker detection, that is, to determine whether a specified speaker is speaking during a given segment of conversational telephone speech. The task was divided into 15 distinct and separate tests involving one of five training conditions and one of four test conditions. Further information about the test conditions and additional documentation is available at the NIST web site for the 2006 SRE and within the 2006 SRE Evaluation Plan.
The speech data in this release was collected by LDC as part of the Mixer project, in particular Mixer Phases 1, 2 and 3. The Mixer project supports 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. The data is mostly English speech, but includes some speech in the above languages
The telephone speech segments are multi-channel data collected simultaneously from a number of auxiliary microphones. The files are organized into three types: two-channel excerpts of approximately 10 seconds, two-channel conversations of approximately 5 minutes and summed-channel conversations also of approximately 5 minutes.
English language transcripts in .ctm format were produced using an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system.
2006 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Set is distributed on seven 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) 2006 NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program - Meeting Data Test Set Part 2 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 twenty 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. To the extent possible, the VACE and CHIL programs harmonized their evaluation protocols and metrics.
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).
2006 NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program - Meeting Data Test Set Part 2 is distributed on ten 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.
*
(3) Chinese Gigaword Fifth Edition was produced by LDC. It is a comprehensive archive of newswire text data that has been acquired from Chinese news sources by LDC at the University of Pennsylvania. Chinese Gigaword Fifth Edition includes all of the content of the fourth edition of Chinese Gigaword (LDC2009T27) plus new data covering the period from January 2009 through December 2010.
Eight distinct sources of Chinese newswire are represented here:
•· Agence France Presse(afp_cmn)
•· Central News Agency, Taiwan(cna_cmn)
•· Central News Service(cns_cmn)
•· Guangming Daily(gmw_cmn)
•· People's Daily(pda_cmn)
•· People's Liberation Army Daily(pla_cmn)
•· Xinhua News Agency(xin_cmn)
•· Zaobao Newspaper(zbn_cmn)
The seven-letter codes in the parentheses above are used for the directory names and data files for each source. Articles covering the period from January 2009 through December 2010 have been added to the Agence France Presse, Central News Agency (CNA), Central News Service, Guangming Daily, People's Liberation Army Daily and Xinhua News Agency data sets. The data from People's Daily covers the period from late June 2009 through December 2010. No new data from Zaobao has been added.
Chinese Gigaword Fifth Edition is distributed on one 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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