In this newsletter:

2013 LDC Podcast Available from LDC Blog

Membership Discounts for MY 2013 Still Available

Penn Discourse Treebank Version 2.0 Update - RTE data

New publications:

Chinese-English Biology and Chemistry Abstract Parallel Text

GALE Phase 2 Arabic Web Parallel Text

2013 LDC Podcast Available from LDC Blog

Kicking off the new year is the fourth podcast in our 20th Anniversary series featuring LDC Senior Researcher, Mohamed Maamouri.

Mohamed directs the Arabic Treebank group and spearheads the development of Arabic resources and projects. The latter includes the leading role in LDC’s collaboration with Georgetown University Press to develop updated versions of three dialectal Arabic dictionaries (Iraqi, Moroccan, Syrian). In this podcast, he reflects on his personal and professional experiences and comments on Arabic resource development at LDC.

Click here for Mohamed’s podcast.

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

Membership Discounts for MY 2013 Still Available

If you are considering joining for Membership Year 2013 (MY2013), there is still time to save on membership fees.   Any organization which joins or renews membership for 2013 through Friday, March 1, 2013, is entitled to a 5% discount on membership fees.  Organizations which held membership for MY2012 can receive a 10% discount on fees provided they renew prior to March 1, 2013.  For further information on pricing, please consult our Announcements page or contact LDC.

    Penn Discourse Treebank Version 2.0 Update - RTE data

A Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE) update is now available for Penn Discourse Treebank Version 2.0 LDC2008T05 (PDTB).  This data has been used to run the textual entailment experiments described in: Sara Tonelli and Elena Cabrio 'Hunting for Entailing Pairs in the Penn Discourse Treebank', in Proceedings of Coling 2012, Mumbay, India. The files contain Text - Hypothesis pairs in the standard RTE xml format (for more details, see  RTE Challenge at TAC 2011), which have been manually annotated as entailing or not entailing. All sentence pairs have been extracted from the Penn Discourse Treebank and are therefore connected by a discourse relation label.

The data are not included in the general release of Penn Discourse Treebank Version 2.0, but are freely available for download from the catalog page. 

New Publications

(1) Chinese-English Biology and Chemistry Abstract Parallel Text was developed by The MITRE Corporation. It consists of parallel sentences from a collection of chemistry and biology-related scientific article abstracts published in Mandarin and translated into English by translators with particular expertise in the technical area. Translators were instructed to err on the side of literal translation if required, but to maintain the technical writing style of the source and make the resulting English as natural as possible. The translators were given specific guidelines for translation, and those are included in this distribution.

This release contains 2,239 lines of parallel Mandarin and English, with a total of 156,445 characters of Mandarin and 75,515 words of English, presented in a separate UTF-8 plain text file for each language. The sentences were translated in sequential order and presented in scrambled order, such that parallel sentences at identical line numbers are translations. For example, the 31st line of the English file is a translation of the 31st line of the Mandarin file. The original line sequence is not provided.

Chinese-English Biology and Chemistry Abstract Parallel Text is distributed via web download.

2013 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this data on disc.  2013 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for US$1500.

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(2) GALE Phase 2 Arabic Web Parallel Text was developed by LDC. 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 web data collected in 2007 by LDC and transcribed by LDC or under its direction. GALE Phase 2 Arabic Web Parallel Text includes 60 source-translation document pairs, comprising 42,089 words of Arabic source text and its English translation. Data was drawn from various Arabic weblog and newsgroup sources.

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 were then 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. Source data and translations are distributed in TDF format. TDF files are tab-delimited files containing one segment of text along with meta information about that segment.

GALE Phase 2 Arabic Web Parallel Text is distributed via web download.

2013 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this data on disc.  2013 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for US$1750.