In this newsletter:

- LDC 20th Anniversary Workshop  -

New publications:

LDC2012T11
-  American English Nickname Collection  -

LDC2012T07
-  Arabic Treebank - Broadcast News v1.0  -

LDC2012T10
-  Catalan TimeBank 1.0  -

LDC 20th Anniversary Workshop

LDC announces its 20th Anniversary Workshop on Language Resources, to be held in Philadelphia on September 6-7, 2012. The event will commemorate our anniversary, reflect on the beginning of language data centers and address the future of language resources.

Workshop themes will include: the developments in human language technologies and associated resources that have brought us to our current state; the language resources required by the technical approaches taken and the impact of these resources on HLT progress; the applications of HLT and resources to other disciplines including law, medicine, economics, the political sciences and psychology; the impact of HLTs and related technologies on linguistic analysis and novel approaches in fields as widespread as phonetics, semantics, language documentation, sociolinguistics and dialect geography; and finally, the impact of any of these developments on the ways in which language resources are created, shared and exploited and on the specific resources required.

Stay tuned for further details.

New publications

(1) American English Nickname Collection was developed by Intelius, Inc. and is a compilation of American English nicknames to given name mappings based on information in US government records, public web profiles and financial and property reports. This corpus is intended as a tool for the quantitative study of nickname usage in the United States such as in demographic and sociological studies.

The American English Nickname Collection contains 331,237 distinct mappings encompassing millions of names. The data was collected and processed through a record linkage pipeline. The steps in the pipeline were (1) data cleaning, (2) blocking, (3) pair-wise linkage and (4) clustering. In the cleaning step, material was categorized, processed to remove junk and spam records and normalized to an approximately common representation. The blocking process utilized an algorithm to group records by shared properties for determining which record pairs should be examined by the pairwise linker as potential duplicates. The linkage step assigned a score to record pairs using a supervised pairwise-based machine learning model. The clustering step combined record pairs into connected components and further partitioned each connected component to remove inconsistent pairwise links. The result is that input records were partitioned into disjoint sets called profiles, where each profile corresponded to a single person.

The material is presented in the form of a comma delimited text file. Each line contains a first name, a nickname or alias, its conditional probability and its frequency. The conditional probability for each nickname is derived from the base data using an algorithm which calculates both the probability for which any alias refers to a given name and a threshold below which the mapping is most likely an error. This threshold eliminates typographic errors and other noise from the data.

American English Nickname Collection is distributed via web download.

2012 Subscription Members will receive two copies of this data on disc provided that they have submitted a completed copy of the User License Agreement for American English Nickname Collection (LDC2012T11). 2012 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.   Non-members may license this data by completing the User License Agreement for American English Nickname Collection (LDC2012T11).  The agreement can be faxed to +1 215 573 2175 or scanned and emailed to this address.  The collection is being made available at no charge.

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(2) Arabic Treebank - Broadcast News v1.0 was developed at LDC. It consists of 120 transcribed Arabic broadcast news stories with part-of-speech, morphology, gloss and syntactic tree annotation in accordance with the Penn Arabic Treebank (PATB) Morphological and Syntactic Annotation Guidelines. The ongoing PATB project supports research in Arabic-language natural language processing and human language technology development.

This release contains 432,976 source tokens before clitics were split, and 517,080 tree tokens after clitics were separated for treebank annotation. The source materials are Arabic broadcast news stories collected by LDC during the period 2005-2008 from the following sources: Abu Dhabi TV, Al Alam News Channel, Al Arabiya, Al Baghdadya TV, Al Fayha, Alhurra, Al Iraqiyah, Aljazeera, Al Ordiniyah, Al Sharqiyah, Dubai TV, Kuwait TV, Lebanese Broadcasting Corp., Oman TV, Radio Sawa, Saudi TV and Syria TV. The transcripts were produced by LDC.

Arabic Treebank - Broadcast News v1.0 is distributed via web download.

2012 Subscription Members will receive two copies of this data on disc. 2012 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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(3) Catalan TimeBank 1.0 was developed by researchers at Barcelona Media and consists of Catalan texts in the AnCora corpus annotated with temporal and event information according to the TimeML specification language.

TimeML is a schema 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. Catalan Timebank 1.0 is annotated in three levels, marking events, time expressions and event metadata. The TimeML annotation scheme was tailored for the specifics of the Catalan language. Temporal relations in Catalan present distinctions of verbal mood (e.g., indicative, subjunctive, conditional, etc.) and grammatical aspect (e.g., imperfective) which are absent in English.

Catalan TimeBank 1.0 contains stand-off annotations for 210 documents with over 75,800 tokens (including punctuation marks) and 68,000 tokens (excluding punctuation). The source documents are from the EFE news agency, the ACN Catalan news agency2 and the Catalan version of the El Períodico newspaper, and span the period from January to December 2000.

The AnCora corpus is the largest multilayer annotated corpus of Spanish and Catalan. AnCora contains 400,000 words in Spanish and 275,000 words in Catalan. The AnCora documents are annotated on many linguistic levels including structure, syntax, dependencies, semantics and pragmatics. That information is not included in this release, but it can be mapped to the present annotations. The corpus is freely available from the Centre de Llenguatge i Computació (CLiC)'.

Catalan TimeBank 1.0 is distributed by web download.

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