In this newsletter:

-  Spring 2012 LDC Data Scholarship Program - deadline approaching!  -

-  LDC Exhibiting at LSA 2012 Annual Meeting  -

-  LDC Hosts Satellite Workshop at LSA 2012  -

-  LDC to Close for Winter Break  -

New publications

LDC2011S10
- 2006 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set Part 1  -

LDC2011S11
-  2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Supplemental Set  -

 Spring 2012 LDC Data Scholarship Program - deadline fast approaching!

The deadline for the Spring 2012 LDC Data Scholarship Program is less than a month away!   Applications are being accepted through January 15, 2012.  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. 

Students will need to complete an application which consists of a data use proposal and letter of support from their adviser.  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.

LDC looks forward to mingling with linguists and language specialists when we exhibit at the 86^th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). The main conference will be held over January 5-8, 2012 at the Portland, OR Hilton and Executive Tower and the exhibit hall will be open from January 6-8th (limited hours on Sunday the 8^th). Please stop by our display for news on what 2012 will hold for LDC and to receive some of our conference giveaways.

LSA 2012 will feature plenary talks on the following topics:

•         Patrice Speeter Beddor (University of Michigan): 'The Dynamics of Speech Perception: Constancy, Variation, and Change'

•          Dan Jurafsky (Stanford University): 'Computing Meaning: Learning and Extracting Meaning from Text'

•         Ted Supalla (University of Rochester): 'Rethinking the Emergence of Grammatical Structure in Signed Languages: New Evidence from Variation and Historical Change in American Sign Language'

For further information visit the LSA Annual Meeting website. If you would like to learn more about LDC’s conference preparations, please ‘like’ our Facebookpage.

We hope to see you there!

LDC will co-host a satellite workshop entitled Sociolinguistic Archival Preparation on January 4-5, 2012 in conjunction with the LSA 2012 Annual Meeting  in Portland, OR.  This two-day workshop will focus on techniques to permit the archiving of data, for cross-community sharing of corpora as well as for subsequent 'panel' studies. Recent discussions within the field have concluded that present protocols need to be expanded to permit adequate archiving. Specifically:

•        Institutional Review Board (IRB) paperwork needs to be adapted to provide protection for interviewees while permitting their speech data to be more generally sharable (and therefore archiveable);

•       Demographic, situational, and attitudinal protocols are needed to provide a unified resource serving multiple research communities as well as the contributing researchers.

The sooner IRB forms and research protocols are aligned with each other, the sooner sharable, archiveable corpora will become available, permitting intergroup comparison and interdisciplinary collaboration.

LDC's Executive Director, Christopher Cieri, and LDC consultant and University of Arizona scholar, Malcah Yaeger-Dror, are the workshop organizers. This workshop is funded in part by the National Science Foundation (BCS#1144480). Further information about the workshop is available on the LSA Annual Meeting website.

LDC will be closed from Monday, December 26, 2011 through Monday, January 2, 2012 in accordance with the University of Pennsylvania Winter Break Policy.  Our offices will reopen on Tuesday, January 3, 2012.  Requests received for membership renewals and corpora during the Winter Break will be processed at that time.

Best wishes for a happy and safe holiday season!

(1) 2006 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set Part 1 was developed by LDC and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).  It contains 437 hours of conversational telephone and microphone speech in English, Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Farsi, Hindi, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Thai and Urdu and associated English transcripts used as test 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 Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Farsi, Hindi, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Thai and Urdu.

The telephone speech segments are multi-channel data collected simultaneously from a number of auxiliary microphones. The files are organized into four types: two-channel excerpts of approximately 10 seconds, two-channel conversations of approximately 5 minutes, summed-channel conversations also of approximately 5 minutes and a two-channel conversation with the usual telephone speech replaced by auxiliary microphone data in the putative target speaker channel. The auxiliary microphone conversations are also of approximately five minutes in length.

English language transcripts in .ctm format were produced using an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system.

2006 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set Part 1 is distributed on five 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.

(2) 2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Supplemental Set was developed by LDC and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and contains additional data distributed after the main 2008 Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE). Specifically, the corpus consists of 770 hours of English microphone speech along with transcripts and other materials used as supplemental data in the 2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE) and in a follow-up evaluation to SRE08.

The 2008 evaluation was distinguished from prior evaluations 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 follow-up evaluation focused on speaker detection in the context of conversational interview type speech and was designed to measure the performance of SRE08 systems in previously unexposed test segment channel conditions.

LDC previously released the main 2008 NIST SRE Evaluation in three parts as 2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Set Part 1 LDC2011S05, 2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Set Part 2 LDC2011S07 and 2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set LDC2011S08.

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 microphone speech in this corpus is in English and consists of approximately 3 minute and 30 minute interview excerpts.

This supplemental data is split into four different parts which provide:

•         new training data distributed to 2008 SRE participants
•        additional data distributed to participants in the 2008 SRE follow-up evaluation
•         interviewer channel files for the 2008 SRE main test (released after the evaluations)
•         supplemental training data (released after the evaluations)

English language transcripts in .cfm format were produced using an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system and are included for some, but not all, speech data.

2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Supplemental Set is distributed on five 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.