In this newsletter:

-   Spring 2012 LDC Data Scholarship Recipients!  -

-  Membership Fee Savings and Publications Pipeline for MY2012  -

New publications:

LDC2012S03
-   Digital Archive of Southern Speech (DASS)  -

LDC2012T01
-   ModeS TimeBank 1.0  -

Spring 2012 LDC Data Scholarship Recipients!

LDC is pleased to announce the student recipients of the Spring 2012 LDC Data Scholarship program!  This program provides university students with access to LDC data at no-cost. Students were asked to complete an application which consisted of a proposal describing their intended use of the data, as well as a letter of support from their thesis adviser. We received many solid applications and have chosen six proposals to support.   The following students will receive no-cost copies of LDC data:

Zainab Ali Khalaf  – University of Science, Malaysia (Malaysia), graduate student, Computer Science. Zainab has been awarded a copy of 1996 English Broadcast News Transcripts (HUB4) (LDC97T22) for her work in spoken document retrieval. 

Daniel Jettka – Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), graduate student, Centre for Language & Communication Studies.  Daniel has been awarded  copies of Penn Discourse Treebank Version 2.0 (LDC2008T05) and RST Discourse Treebank (LDC2002T07) for his work in anaphora resolution.

Olga Nickolaevna Ladoshko - National Technical University of Ukraine “KPI” (Ukraine), graduate student, Acoustics and Acoustoelectronics. Olga has been awarded copies of  NTIMT (LDC93S2) and STC-TIMIT 1.0 (LDC2008S03) for her research in automatic speech recognition for Ukrainian.

Ming Yang, Xiaoxiao Ma, and Jiajia Huang – Wuhan University (China), graduate students, Computer Science.  Ming, Xiaoxiao, and Jiajia have been awarded  copies of ACE Time Normalization (TERN) 2004 English Training Data v 1.0 (LDC2005T07) and GALE Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text – Part 1 (LDC2007T23) for their work in summarization and data mining.

Daria Vazhenina – University of Aizu (Japan), graduate student, Human Interface Lab.  Daria has been awarded a copy of 2005 Spring NIST Rich Transcription (RT-05S) Evaluation Set (LDC2011S06) for her work in speaker diarization.

Tanina Zappone - University of Rome “La Sapienza” (Italy), graduate student, Oriental Studies.  Tanina has been awarded a copy of Chinese Treebank 7.0 (LDC2010T07) for her work in China’s political communications.

Please join us in congratulating our student recipients!   The next LDC Data Scholarship program is scheduled for the Fall 2012 semester.

Membership Fee Savings and Publications Pipeline for MY2012

Time is quickly running out to save on membership fees for MY2012! Any organization which joins or renews membership for 2012 through Thursday, March 1, 2012, is entitled to a 5% discount on membership fees.  Organizations which held membership for MY2011 can receive a 10% discount on fees provided they renew prior to March 1, 2012.

Many publications for MY2012 are still in development. The planned publications for the upcoming months include:

ARRAU (Anaphor Resolution and Underspecification) ~ data annotated for anaphoric relations, with information about agreement and explicit representation of multiple antecedents for ambiguous anaphoric expressions and discourse antecedents for expressions which refer to abstract entities such as events, actions and plans. The corpus contains texts from various genres: task-oriented dialogues from the TRAINS project, narratives from the English Pear Stories , and newspaper articles from the Wall Street Journal portion of the Penn Treebank.

MALACH English ~ over 300 hours of English audio recordings of interviews conducted under the auspices of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education and associated transcripts produced as part of the Multilingual Access to Large Spoken ArCHives (MALACH) project. 

Malto Speech and Transcripts ~ speech files of Malto narratives recorded by Masato Kobayashi and Bablu Tirkey with associated transcripts. Malto is a Dravidian language spoken in northeastern India and Bangladesh.

NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program – Broadcast News ~ English broadcast news video annotated for the VACE (Video Analysis and Content Extraction) 2005 face, text and text word detection and tracking tasks.

OntoNotes 5.0 ~ multiple genres of English, Chinese, and Arabic text annotated for syntax, predicate argument structure and shallow semantics.

2012 Subscription Members are automatically sent all MY2012 data as it is released.  2012 Standard Members are entitled to request 16 corpora for free from MY2012.   Non-members may license most data for research use.

New publications

(1) Digital Archive of Southern Speech (DASS) was developed by the University of Georgia. It is a subset of the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS), which is in turn part of the Linguist Atlas Project (LAP). DASS contains approximately 370 hours of English speech data from 30 female speakers and 34 male speakers in .wav format and in .mp3 format, along with associated metadata about the speakers and the recordings and maps in .jpeg format relating to the recording locations.

LAP consists of a set of survey research projects about the words and pronunciation of everyday American English, the largest project of its kind in the United States. Interviews with thousands of native speakers across the country have been carried out since 1929. LAGS surveyed the everyday speech of Georgia, Tennessee, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas in a series of 914 audio-taped interviews conducted from 1968-1983. Interviews average approximately six hours in length; the systematic LAGS tape archive amounts to 5500 hours of sound recordings. DASS is a collection of 64 interviews from LAGS selected to cover a range of speech across the region and to represent multiple education levels and ethnic backgrounds.

Also included in this release is a version of the LICHEN software developed at the University of Oulu, Finland. LICHEN allows users to browse and search through the audio data in a more advanced fashion using a graphical interface.

Digital Archive of Southern Speech (DASS) is distributed on one hard disc drive.

2012 Subscription Not-for-Profit/US Government Members will automatically receive one copy of this data.  2012 For-Profit Members will receive a copy provided that they have submitted a completed copy of the User License Agreement for Digital Archive of Southern Speech (LDC2012S03).  2012 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for US$250.

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(2) ModeS TimeBank 1.0 was developed by researchers at Technical University of Madrid and Barcelona Media and is a corpus of Modern Spanish (17th and 18th centuries) annotated with temporal and event information according to TimeML mark-up and annotated with spatial information following the SpatialML scheme.

TimeML (Pustejovsky et al., 2005) is a specification language for annotating eventualities and time expressions in natural language as well as the temporal relations among them, thus facilitating the task of extraction, representation and exchange of temporal information. SpatialML (Mani et al., 2008) is a specification language for annotating and normalizing spatial expressions by means of geographic coordinates.

ModeS TimeBank 1.0 contains 102 documents reporting a sea-crossing cruise by a ship called La Princesa, which took place from December 1768 to April 1769. There exist copious logbooks from that period that not only provide information about shipping routes, but also contain valuable data concerning information flows, commercial agents and social networks.

All text is encoded in UTF-8. The data in ModeS TimeBank 1.0 has been tokenized, POS-tagged, and annotated with space, time and event information according to the TimeML and SpatialML specification schemes.

ModeS TimeBank 1.0 is distributed via web download. 

2012 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus on disc.  2012 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may request this data by completing a copy of the LDC User Agreement for Non-Members.  The agreement can be faxed +1 215 573 2175 or scanned and emailed to this address.  This data is available at no charge.