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ELRA - Language Resources Catalogue - Update
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ELRA is happy to announce that 2 new Speech     Telephone Resources are now available in its catalogue.
    Moreover, an updated version of the Bilingual Collocational     Dictionary (Horst Bogatz) has also been released.     
   
    1) New Language Resources:
     
      ELRA-S0343 VERIF1DE
    The speech corpus VERIF1DE contains 20 recordings (sessions) of     150 German speakers each over the telephone network (10 sessions     over fixed network and 10 sessions over GSM). Each session contains  40 single recordings, mainly speech read from a prompt sheet.
   For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1169
   
    ELRA-S0344 LILA Hindi Belt database
    The LILA Hindi Belt database comprises 2,023 Hindi speakers     (1,011 males and 1,012 females, all speakers with Hindi as first     language) recorded over the Indian mobile telephone network. Each  speaker uttered 83 read and spontaneous items.
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1170
   
    2) Updated Language Resource:
     
    ELRA-M0013 Bilingual Collocational Dictionary (Horst Bogatz)
    This new release contains  69,000  English headwords (instead       of 40,000 for the previous release).
    The bilingual English-German collocational dictionary consists of     around 69,000 English headwords, including concepts expressed with     more than one word (e.g. 'the awareness of the environment' or 'lame     duck') and hyphenated compounds. It contains verbs, adjectives,     synonyms and phrases that collocate with the headword. It provides     the German equivalents for the headwords as well as their English     synonyms.
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=451
    
    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 2012 LDC Data Scholarship Recipients  -

-  LDC Exhibiting at NWAV 41  - 

-  LDC 20th Anniversary Workshop Wrap-up  -

-  LDC 20th Anniversary Podcasts              -

-  Language Resource Wiki  -

New publications:

-  GALE Chinese-English Word Alignment and  Tagging Training Part 2 -- Newswire  -

-  GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast News Parallel Text  -

Fall 2012 LDC Data Scholarship Recipients

LDC is pleased to announce the student recipients  of the Fall 2012 LDC Data Scholarship program!  This program provides university and college 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:

     

Jaffar Atwan - National University of Malaysia (Malaysia), Phd  candidate, Information Science and           Technology.  Jaffar has been awarded a copy of Arabic Newswire
          Part 1 (LDC2001T55) for his work in information retrieval.
         
          Sarath Chandar - Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (India), MS candidate, Computer Science and Engineering.  Sarath has been awarded a copy of Treebank-3 (LDC99T42) forhis work in grammar induction.
         
          Kuruvachan K. George - Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham (India), Phd Candidate, Electrical and Computer Engineering.  Kuruvachan   has been awarded a copy of Fisher English Part 2 (LDC2005S13/T19) and2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation data (LDC2011S05/07/08/11) for his work in speaker recognition.

     

Eduardo Motta - Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), Phd candidate, Information           Sciences.  Eduardo has been awarded a copy of English Web Treebank (LDC2012T13) for his work in machine learning.

     

Genevieve Sapijaszko - University of Central  Florida (USA), Phd Candidate, Electrical and Computer           Engineering.  Genevieve  been awarded a copy TIMIT Acoustic-Phonetic Continuous Speech Corpus (LDC93S1) and YOHO Speaker Verification (LDC94S16) for her work in digital signal processing.
         
John Steinberg - Temple University (USA), MS candidate, Electrical and Computer Engineering.  John has been awarded a copy of CALLHOME Mandarin Chinese Lexicon (LDC96L15) and CALLHOME Mandarin Chinese Transcripts (LDC96T16) for his  work in speech recognition.

   

LDC Exhibiting at NWAV 41

The conference runs from October 25-28 and the exhibition hall will be open from October 26-28, 2012. Please stop by to say hello!
     

LDC 20th Anniversary Workshop Wrap-up

In early September, LDC hosted a workshop entitled  “The Future of Language Resources” in celebration of  our 20th anniversary. Visit  the Program   page to browse speaker abstracts and to access pdfs of the   presentations. Thanks to the speakers and attendees for making the workshop a success!

LDC 20th Anniversary Podcasts

To further celebrate our 20th Anniversary, LDC is  conducting  interviews of long-time staff members for their unique perspectives on the  Consortium’s growth and evolution over the past two decades. The first interview podcast debuts this month and features Dave Graff, LDC’s Lead Programmer. Visit the LDC blog to access the podcast.

Other podcasts will  be published via the LDC blog, so stay tuned to that space.
       

Language Resource Wiki

The Language Resource Wiki  catalogs data, software, descriptive grammars and other resources for a variety of languages but especially those with a paucity of generally available resources for research. LDC is actively seeking editors knowledgeable in these and other languages to develop and maintain the pages, which are readable by anyone but  writable only by editors. The wiki currently has resource listings  for: Bengali, Berber, Breton, Ewe, Greek (Ancient), Indonesian, Hindi, Latin, Panjabi, Pashto, Sorani (Central Kurdish), Russian, Tagalog, Tamil, and Urdu, and for the following Sign Languages: American, British, Catalan, Dutch, Flemish, German, Japanese, New Zealand, Polish, Spanish, and Swiss German.
       
       

New
            publications
       

(1) GALE Chinese-English Word Alignment and Tagging Training Part 2 -- Newswire was  developed by LDC and contains 169,080 tokens of word aligned  Chinese and English parallel text enriched with linguistic tags. This material was used as training data in the DARPA  GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) program.

Some approaches to statistical machine translation include the incorporation of linguistic knowledge in word  aligned text as a means to improve automatic word alignment and  machine translation quality. This is accomplished with two annotation schemes: alignment and tagging. Alignment identifies minimum translation units and translation relations by using  minimum-match and attachment annotation approaches. A set of  word tags and alignment link tags are designed in the tagging  scheme to describe these translation units and relations. Tagging adds contextual, syntactic and language-specific features to the alignment annotation.

     

The Chinese word alignment tasks consisted of the following components:

     

Identifying, aligning, and tagging 8 different  types of links

     

Identifying, attaching, and tagging local-level  unmatched words

     

Identifying and tagging sentence/discourse-level unmatched words

     

Identifying and tagging all instances of Chinese  的(DE) except when they were a part of a semantic link.

   

GALE Chinese-English Word Alignment and Tagging Training Part 2 -- Newswire is distributed via web download.

2012 Subscription Members will automatically 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$1750.

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(2) GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast News Parallel Text was developed by LDC, and along with other corpora, the parallel text in this  release comprised training data for Phase 2 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) Program. This corpus contains Modern Standard Arabic source text and corresponding  English translations selected from broadcast news (BN) data collected by LDC between 2005 and 2007 and transcribed by LDC or under its direction.

GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast News Parallel Text includes seven source-translation pairs, comprising 29,210 words of Arabic source text and its English translation. Data is drawn from six distinct Arabic programs broadcast between 2005 and  2007 from Abu Dhabi TV, based in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; Al Alam News Channel, based in Iran; Aljazeera, a regional broadcast programmer based in Doha, Qatar; Dubai TV,  based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; and Kuwait TV, a national television station based in Kuwait. The BN programming in this release focuses on current events topics.

The files in this release were transcribed by LDC  staff and/or transcription vendors under contract to LDC in accordance with the Quick Rich Transcription guidelines developed by LDC. Transcribers indicated sentence boundaries in addition to transcribing the    text. Data was manually selected for translation according to several criteria, including linguistic features, transcription         features and topic features. The transcribed and segmented files werethen reformatted into a human-readable translation format and assigned to translation vendors. Translators followed LDC's Arabic to English translation guidelines. Bilingual LDC staff performed quality control procedures on the completed  translations.

GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast News Parallel Text is distributed via web download.
       
        2012 Subscription Members will automatically 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$1750.

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Speechocean - Language Resource Catalogue - New Released (01- 2012)

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:

Chinese and English Mixing Speech Synthesis Database (Female)

The Chinese Mandarin TTS Speech Corpus contains the read speech of a native Chinese Female professional broadcaster recorded in a studio with high SNR (>35dB) over two channels (AKG C4000B microphone and Electroglottography (EGG) sensor). 
The Corpus includes the following categories:
1.    Basic Mandarin sub-corpus: including 5,000 utterances which were carefully designed considering all kinds of linguistic phenomena. All sentences were declarative and extracted from News channels of People's Daily, China Daily, etc. The prompts with negative words were carefully excluded. ONLY suitable length sentences were accepted (7~20 words, in average 14 words). This sub-corpus can be used for R&D of HMM-based TTS, Limit domain TTS and Small-scale concatenative TTS;
2.    Complementary Mandarin sub-corpus: including 10,000 utterances which were carefully designed considering all kinds of linguistic phenomena. All sentences were declarative and extracted from News channels of People's Daily, China Daily, etc. The prompts with negative words are carefully excluded. ONLY suitable length sentences were accepted (7~20 words, average 14 words). This sub-corpus is a complementary corpus for Basic Mandarin sub-corpus and can be used for R&D of Large-scale concatenative TTS;
3.    Mandarin Neutral sub-corpus: including 380 Chinese bi-syllable words which embedded in carrier sentences;
4.    Mandarin ERHUA sub-corpus: including 290 Chinese Erhua syllables which embedded in carrier sentences;
5.    Mandarin Digit-String sub-corpus: including 1250 utterances with 3-digit length which considered the different pronunciation of 1, i.e. “yi1” and “yao1”.
6.    Mandarin Question sub-corpus: including 300 question sentences with common used question mark, for example “吗”, “么”, “呢”, and etc.;
7.    Mandarin exclamatory sub-corpus: including 200 exclamatory sentences with common used exclamatory mark, for example “呀”, “啊”, “吧”, “啦”, and etc.;
8.    Chinese English sentence sub-corpus: including 1,000 sentences which were carefully designed considering bi-phone coverage. All sentences were extracted from News channels of Voice of America (VOA), and etc. The prompts with negative words are carefully excluded. ONLY suitable length sentences were accepted (7~20 words, in average 12 words) and phonetically annotated with SAMPA. This sub-corpus can be used for R&D of HMM-based TTS, Limit domain TTS and Small-scale concatenative TTS;
9.    Chinese English words sub-corpus: including about 6,000 commonly used English words which embedded in carrier sentence;
10.    Chinese English Abbreviation sub-corpus: including about 200 utterances which considered not only the alphabet coverage, but also the combination of character and digit, such as “MP4”;
11.    Chinese English Letter sub-corpus: including 26 carrier utterances with each letter embedded in the Beginning, Middle and End;
12.    Chinese Greek Letter sub-corpus: including 24 carrier utterances with each letter embedded in the Beginning, Middle and End.

All speech data are segmented and labeled on phone level. Pronunciation lexicon and pitch extract from EEG can also be provided based on demands.

France French Speech Recognition Corpus (desktop) – 50 speakers

This France French desktop speech recognition database was collected by SpeechOcean in France. 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 50 different native speakers who were balanced distributed by age (mainly 16 – 30, 31 – 45, 46 – 60), gender (28 males, 22 females) and regional accents. The script was specially designed to provide material for both training and testing of many classes of speech recognition applications. Each speaker recorded 500 utterances in a quiet office environment through two professional microphones. Each utterance is stored as 44.1K 16Bit uncompressed PCM format and accompanied by an ASCII SAM label file which contains the relevant descriptive information.

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

UK English Speech Recognition Corpus (desktop) – 50 speakers

This UK English desktop speech recognition database was collected by SpeechOcean in England. 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 50 different native speakers who were balanced distributed by age (mainly 16 – 30, 31 – 45, 46 – 60), gender (28 males, 22 females) and regional accents. The script was specially designed to provide material for both training and testing of many classes of speech recognition applications. Each speaker recorded 500 utterances in a quiet office environment through two professional microphones. Each utterance is stored as 44.1K 16Bit uncompressed PCM format and accompanied by an ASCII SAM label file which contains the relevant descriptive information.

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

US English Speech Recognition Corpus (desktop) – 50 speakers

This US English desktop speech recognition database was collected by SpeechOcean in America. 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 50 different native speakers who were balanced distributed by age (mainly 16 – 30, 31 – 45, 46 – 60), gender (25 males, 25 females) and regional accents. The script was specially designed to provide material for both training and testing of many classes of speech recognition applications. Each speaker recorded 500 utterances in a quiet office environment through two professional microphones. Each utterance is stored as 44.1K 16Bit uncompressed PCM format and accompanied by an ASCII SAM label file which contains the relevant descriptive information.

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

Italian Speech Recognition Corpus (desktop) – 50 speakers

This Italian desktop speech recognition database was collected by SpeechOcean in Italy. 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 50 different native speakers who were balanced distributed by age (mainly 16 – 30, 31 – 45, 46 – 60), gender (23 males, 27 females) and regional accents. The script was specially designed to provide material for both training and testing of many classes of speech recognition applications. Each speaker recorded 500 utterances in a quiet office environment through two professional microphones. Each utterance is stored as 44.1K 16Bit uncompressed PCM format and accompanied by an ASCII SAM label file which contains the relevant descriptive information.

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

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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Appen ButlerHill 

A global leader in linguistic technology solutions

RECENT CATALOG ADDITIONS—MARCH 2012

1. Speech Databases

1.1 Telephony

2. Pronunciation Lexica

Appen Butler Hill has considerable experience in providing a variety of lexicon types. These include:

 Pronunciation Lexica providing phonemic representation, syllabification, and stress (primary and secondary as appropriate)

 Part-of-speech tagged Lexica providing grammatical and semantic labels

 Other reference text based materials including spelling/mis-spelling lists, spell-check dictionar-ies, mappings of colloquial language to standard forms, orthographic normalization lists.

Over a period of 15 years, Appen Butler Hill has generated a significant volume of licensable material for a wide range of languages. For holdings information in a given language or to discuss any customized development efforts, please contact: sales@appenbutlerhill.com

4. Other Language Resources

 Morphological Analyzers – Farsi/Persian & Urdu

 Arabic Thesaurus

 Language Analysis Documentation – multiple languages

For additional information on these resources, please contact: sales@appenbutlerhill.com

5. Customized Requests and Package Configurations

Appen Butler Hill is committed to providing a low risk, high quality, reliable solution and has worked in 130+ languages to-date supporting both large global corporations and Government organizations.

We would be glad to discuss to any customized requests or package configurations and prepare a cus-tomized proposal to meet your needs.

                                                         www.appenbutlerhill.com

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