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ELRA - Language Resources Catalogue - Update (April 2014)
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We are happy to announce that 1 new Evaluation Package is now available in our catalogue. 

ELRA-E0042 CLEFeHealth 2013 Evaluation Package
The CLEFeHealth 2013 Task 3 Evaluation Package contains data used for the User-centred health information retrieval Shared task at the CLEFeHealth Lab conducted in 2013. Task 3 aimed at evaluating information retrieval to address questions patients may have when reading clinical reports.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1218

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.htm

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ELRA releases free Language Resources
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Anticipating users’ expectations, ELRA has decided to offer a large number of resources for free for Academic research use. Such an offer consists of several sets of speech, text and multimodal resources that are regularly released, for free, as soon as legal aspects are cleared. A first set was released in May 2012 at the occasion of LREC 2012. A second set is now being released.

Whenever this is permitted by our licences, please feel free to use these resources for deriving new resources and depositing them with the ELRA catalogue for community re-use.

Over the last decade, ELRA has compiled a large list of resources into its Catalogue of LRs. ELRA has negotiated distribution rights with the LR owners and made such resources available under fair conditions and within a clear legal framework. Following this initiative, ELRA has also worked on LR discovery and identification with a dedicated team which investigated and listed existing and valuable resources in its 'Universal Catalogue', a list of resources that could be negotiated on a case-by-case basis. At LREC 2010, ELRA introduced the LRE Map, an inventory of LRs, whether developed or used, that were described in LREC papers. This huge inventory listed by the authors themselves constitutes the first 'community-built' catalogue of existing or emerging resources, constantly enriched and updated at major conferences.

Considering the latest trends on easing the sharing of LRs, from both legal and commercial points of view, ELRA is taking a major role in META-SHARE, a large European open infrastructure for sharing LRs. This infrastructure will allow LR owners, providers and distributors to distribute their LRs through an additional and cost-effective channel.

To obtain the available sets of LRs, please visit the web page below and follow the instructions given online:
http://www.elra.info/Free-LRs,26.html

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 New publications:

-  GALE Arabic-English Word Alignment Training Part 1 -- Newswire and Web  -

-  GALE Phase 2 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text Part 1  -

-  USC-SFI MALACH Interviews and Transcripts Czech  -

(1) GALE Arabic-English Word Alignment Training Part 1 -- Newswire and Web was developed by LDC and contains 344,680 tokens of word aligned Arabic 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.

This release consists of Arabic source newswire and web data collected by LDC in 2006 - 2008. The distribution by genre, words, character tokens and segments appears below:

Note that word count is based on the untokenized Arabic source, and token count is based on the tokenized Arabic source.

The Arabic word alignment tasks consisted of the following components:

• Normalizing  tokenized tokens as needed
• Identifying different types of links
• Identifying sentence segments not suitable for annotation
• Tagging unmatched words attached to other words or phrases

GALE Arabic-English Word Alignment Training Part 1 -- Newswire and Web is distributed via web download.

2014 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this data on disc. 2014 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for US$1750.

(2) GALE Phase 2 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text Part 1 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 Chinese 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.

This release includes 30 source-translation document pairs, comprising 198,350 characters of translated material. Data is drawn from 11 distinct Chinese BN. The broadcast news recordings in this release focus principally on current events.

The data was transcribed by LDC staff and/or transcription vendors under contract to LDC in accordance with 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 Chinese 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. Each field in the TDF file is described in TDF_format.text. All data are encoded in UTF-8.

GALE Phase 2 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text Part 1 is distributed via web download.

2014 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this data on disc. 2014 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for US$1750.

(3) USC-SFI MALACH Interviews and Transcripts Czech was developed by The University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute (USC-SFI) and the University of West Bohemia as part of the MALACH (Multilingual Access to Large Spoken ArCHives) Project. It contains approximately 229 hours of interviews from 420 interviewees along with transcripts and other documentation.

Inspired by his experience making Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg established the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in 1994 to gather video testimonies from survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust. Within several years, the Foundation’s Visual History Archive held nearly 52,000 video testimonies in 32 languages representing 56 countries. It is the largest archive of its kind in the world. In 2006, the Foundation became part of the Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and was renamed as the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education.

The goal of the MALACH project was to develop methods for improved access to large multinational spoken archives. The focus was advancing the state of the art of automatic speech recognition and information retrieval. The characteristics of the USC-SFI collection -- unconstrained, natural speech filled with disfluencies, heavy accents, age-related coarticulations, un-cued speaker and language switching and emotional speech -- were considered well-suited for that task. The work centered on five languages: English, Czech, Russian, Polish and Slovak.

LDC has also released USC-SFI MALACH Interviews and Transcripts English (LDC2012S05).

The speech data in this release was collected beginning in 1994 under a wide variety of conditions ranging from quiet to noisy. Original interviews were recorded on Sony Beta SP tapes, then digitized into a 3 MB/s MPEG-1 stream with 128 kb/s (44 kHz) stereo audio. The sound files in this release are single channel FLAC compressed PCM WAV format at a sampling frequency of 16 kHz.

Approximately 570 of all USC-SFI collected interviews are in Czech and average approximately 2.25 hours each. The interviews sessions in this release are divided into a training set (400 interviews) and a test set (20 interviews). The first fifteen minutes of the second tape from each training interview (approximately 30 total minutes of speech) were transcribed in .trs format using Transcriber 1.5.1. The test interviews were transcribed completely. Thus the corpus consists of 229 hours of speech (186 hours of training material plus 43 hours of test data) with 143 hours transcribed (100 hours of training material plus 43 hours of test data). Certain interviews include speech from family members in addition to that of the subject and the interviewer. Accordingly, the corpus contains speech from more than 420 speakers, who are more or less equally distributed between males and females.

USC-SFI MALACH Interviews and Transcripts Czech is distributed on four DVD-ROM.

2014 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this data provided that they have submitted a completed copy of the User License Agreement for USC-SFI MALACH Interviews and Transcripts Czech (LDC2014S04)   2014 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for US$150.

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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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We are happy to announce the release of DEMAND, a set of real-world
16-channel noise recordings designed for the evaluation of microphone
array processing techniques.

http://www.irisa.fr/metiss/DEMAND/

1.5 h of noise data were recorded in 18 different indoor and outdoor
environments and are available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

Joachim Thiemann (CNRS - IRISA)
Nobutaka Ito (University of Tokyo)
Emmanuel Vincent (Inria Nancy - Grand Est)

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Aide à la finalisation de corpus oraux ou multimodaux pour diffusion, valorisation et dépôt pérenne

Le consortium IRCOM de la TGIR Corpus et l’EquipEx ORTOLANG s’associent pour proposer une aide technique et financière à la finalisation de corpus de données orales ou multimodales à des fins de diffusion et pérennisation par l’intermédiaire de l’EquipEx ORTOLANG. Cet appel ne concerne pas la création de nouveaux corpus mais la finalisation de corpus existants et non-disponibles de manière électronique. Par finalisation, nous entendons le dépôt auprès d’un entrepôt numérique public, et l’entrée dans un circuit d’archivage pérenne. De cette façon, les données de parole qui ont été enrichies par vos recherches vont pouvoir être réutilisées, citées et enrichies à leur tour de manière cumulative pour permettre le développement de nouvelles connaissances, selon les conditions d’utilisation que vous choisirez (sélection de licences d’utilisation correspondant à chacun des corpus déposés).

Cet appel d’offre est soumis à plusieurs conditions (voir ci-dessous) et l’aide financière par projet est limitée à 3000 euros. Les demandes seront traitées dans l’ordre où elles seront reçues par l’ IRCOM. Les demandes émanant d’EA ou de petites équipes ne disposant pas de support technique « corpus » seront traitées prioritairement. Les demandes sont à déposer du 1^er septembre 2013 au 31 octobre 2013. La décision de financement relèvera du comité de pilotage d’IRCOM. Les demandes non traitées en 2013 sont susceptibles de l’être en 2014. Si vous avez des doutes quant à l’éligibilité de votre projet, n’hésitez pas à nous contacter pour que nous puissions étudier votre demande et adapter nos offres futures.

Pour palier la grande disparité dans les niveaux de compétences informatiques des personnes et groupes de travail produisant des corpus, L’ IRCOM propose une aide personnalisée à la finalisation de corpus. Celle-ci sera réalisée par un ingénieur IRCOM en fonction des demandes formulées et adaptées aux types de besoin, qu’ils soient techniques ou financiers.

Les conditions nécessaires pour proposer un corpus à finaliser et obtenir une aide d’IRCOM sont :

• Pouvoir prendre toutes décisions concernant l’utilisation et la diffusion du corpus (propriété intellectuelle en particulier).

• Disposer de toutes les informations concernant les sources des corpus et le consentement des personnes enregistrées ou filmées.

• Accorder un droit d’utilisation libre des données ou au minimum un accès libre pour la recherche scientifique.

Les demandes peuvent concerner tout type de traitement : traitements de corpus quasi-finalisés (conversion, anonymisation), alignement de corpus déjà transcrits, conversion depuis des formats « traitement de textes », digitalisation de support ancien. Pour toute demande exigeant une intervention manuelle importante, les demandeurs devront s’investir en moyens humains ou financiers à la hauteur des moyens fournis par IRCOM et ORTOLANG.

IRCOM est conscient du caractère exceptionnel et exploratoire de cette démarche. Il convient également de rappeler que ce financement est réservé aux corpus déjà largement constitués et ne peuvent intervenir sur des créations ex-nihilo. Pour ces raisons de limitation de moyens, les propositions de corpus les plus avancés dans leur réalisation pourront être traitées en priorité, en accord avec le CP d’IRCOM. Il n’y a toutefois pas de limite « théorique » aux demandes pouvant être faites, IRCOM ayant la possibilité de rediriger les demandes qui ne relèvent pas de ses compétences vers d’autres interlocuteurs.

Les propositions de réponse à cet appel d’offre sont à envoyer à ircom.appel.corpus@gmail.com. Les propositions doivent utiliser le formulaire de deux pages figurant ci-dessous. Dans tous les cas, une réponse personnalisée sera renvoyée par IRCOM.

Ces propositions doivent présenter les corpus proposés, les données sur les droits d’utilisation et de propriétés et sur la nature des formats ou support utilisés.

Cet appel est organisé sous la responsabilité d’IRCOM avec la participation financière conjointe de IRCOM et l’EquipEx ORTOLANG.

Pour toute information complémentaire, nous rappelons que le site web de l'Ircom (http://ircom.corpus-ir.fr) est ouvert et propose des ressources à la communauté : glossaire, inventaire des unités et des corpus, ressources logicielles (tutoriaux, comparatifs, outils de conversion), activités des groupes de travail, actualités des formations, ...

L'IRCOM invite les unités à inventorier leur corpus oraux et multimodaux - 70 projets déjà recensés - pour avoir une meilleure visibilité des ressources déjà disponibles même si elles ne sont pas toutes finalisées.

Le comité de pilotage IRCOM

Utiliser ce formulaire pour répondre à l’appel : Merci.

Réponse à l’appel à la finalisation de corpus oral ou multimodal

Nom du corpus :

Nom de la personne à contacter :

Adresse email :

Numéro de téléphone :

Nature des données de corpus :

Existe-t’il des enregistrements :

Quel média ? Audio, vidéo, autre…

Quelle est la longueur totale des enregistrements ? Nombre de cassettes, nombre d’heures, etc.

Quel type de support ?

Quel format (si connu) ?

Existe-t’il des transcriptions :

Quel format ? (papier, traitement de texte, logiciel de transcription)

Quelle quantité (en heures, nombre de mots, ou nombre de transcriptions) ?

Disposez vous de métadonnées (présentation des droits d’auteurs et d’usage) ?

Disposez-vous d’une description précise des personnes enregistrées ?

Disposez-vous d’une attestation de consentement éclairé pour les personnes ayant été enregistrées ? En quelle année (environ) les enregistrements ont eu lieu ?

Quelle est la langue des enregistrements ?

Le corpus comprend-il des enregistrements d’enfants ou de personnes ayant un trouble du langage ou une pathologie ?

Si oui, de quelle population s’agit-il ?

Dans un souci d’efficacité et pour vous conseiller dans les meilleurs délais, il nous faut disposer d’exemples des transcriptions ou des enregistrements en votre possession. Nous vous contacterons à ce sujet, mais vous pouvez d’ores et déjà nous adresser par courrier électronique un exemple des données dont vous disposez (transcriptions, métadonnées, adresse de page web contenant les enregistrements).

Nous vous remercions par avance de l’intérêt que vous porterez à notre proposition. Pour toutes informations complémentaires veuillez contacter Martine Toda martine.toda@ling.cnrs.fr ou à ircom.appel.corpus@gmail.com.

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Rhapsodie: un Treebank prosodique et syntaxique de français parlé

Nous avons le plaisir d'annoncer que la ressource Rhapsodie, Corpus de français parlé annoté pour la prosodie et la syntaxe, est désormais disponible sur http://www.projet-rhapsodie.fr/

Le treebank Rhapsodie est composé de 57 échantillons sonores (5 minutes en moyenne, au total 3h de parole, 33000 mots) dotés d’une transcription orthographique et phonétique alignées au son.

Il s'agit d’une ressource de français parlé multi genres (parole privée et publique ; monologues et dialogues ; entretiens en face à face vs radiodiffusion, parole plus ou moins interactive et plus ou moins planifiée, séquences descriptives, argumentatives, oratoires et procédurales) articulée autour de sources externes (enregistrements extraits de projets antérieurs, en accord avec les concepteurs initiaux) et internes. Nous tenons en particulier à remercier les responsables des projets CFPP2000, PFC, ESLO, C-Prom ainsi que Mathieu Avanzi, Anne Lacheret, Piet Mertens et Nicolas Obin.

Les échantillons sonores (wave & MP3, pitch nettoyé et lissé), les transcriptions orthographiques (txt), les annotations macrosyntaxiques (txt), les annotations prosodiques (xml, textgrid) ainsi que les metadonnées (xml & html) sont téléchargeables librement selon les termes de la licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d’utilisation commerciale - Partage dans les mêmes conditions 3.0 France.

Les annotations microsyntaxiques seront disponibles prochainement

 Les métadonnées sont également explorables en ligne grâce à un browser.

 Les tutoriels pour la transcription, les annotations et les requêtes sont disponibles sur le site Rhapsodie.

 Enfin, L’annotation prosodique est interrogeable en ligne grâce au langage de requêtes Rhapsodie QL.

 L'équipe Ressource Rhapsodie (Modyco, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre)

Sylvain Kahane, Anne Lacheret, Paola Pietrandrea, Atanas Tchobanov, Arthur Truong.

 Partenaires : IRCAM (Paris), LATTICE (Paris), LPL (Aix-en-Provence), CLLE-ERSS (Toulouse).

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Rhapsodie: a Prosodic and Syntactic Treebank for Spoken French

We are pleased to announce that Rhapsodie, a syntactic and prosodic treebank of spoken French created with the aim of modeling the interface between prosody, syntax and discourse in spoken French is now available at   http://www.projet-rhapsodie.fr/

The Rhapsodie treebank is made up of 57 short samples of spoken French (5 minutes long on average, amounting to 3 hours of speech and a 33 000 word corpus) endowed with an orthographical phoneme-aligned transcription . 

The corpus is representative of different genres (private and public speech; monologues and dialogues; face-to-face interviews and broadcasts; more or less interactive discourse; descriptive, argumentative and procedural samples, variations in planning type).

The corpus samples have been mainly drawn from existing corpora of spoken French and partially created within the frame of theRhapsodie project. We would especially like to thank the coordinators of the  CFPP2000, PFC, ESLO, C-Prom projects as well as Piet Mertens, Mathieu Avanzi, Anne Lacheret and Nicolas Obin.

The sound samples (waves, MP3, cleaned and stylized pitch), the orthographic transcriptions (txt), the macrosyntactic annotations (txt), the prosodic annotations  (xml, textgrid) as well as the metadata (xml and html) can be freely downloaded under the terms of the Creative Commons licence Attribution - Noncommercial - Share Alike 3.0 France.

Microsyntactic annotation will be available soon.

The metadata are  searchable on line through a browser.

The prosodic annotation can be explored on line through the Rhapsodie Query Language.

The tutorials of transcription, annotations and Rhapsodie Query Language  are available on the site.

The Rhapsodie team (Modyco, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre :

Sylvain Kahane, Anne Lacheret, Paola Pietrandrea, Atanas Tchobanov, Arthur Truong.

Partners: IRCAM (Paris), LATTICE (Paris), LPL (Aix-en-Provence),CLLE-ERSS (Toulouse).

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We have created and made publicly available a dense audio-visual person-oriented ground-truth annotation of a feature movie (100 minutes long): “Hannah and her sisters” by Woody Allen.

The annotation includes

•          Face tracks in video (densely annotated, i.e., in each frame, and person-labeled)

•             Speech segments in audio (person-labeled)

•             Shot boundaries in video



The annotation can be useful for evaluating



•   Person-oriented video-based tasks (e.g., face tracking, automatic character naming, etc.)

•             Person-oriented audio-based tasks (e.g., speaker diarization or recognition)

•             Person-oriented multimodal-based tasks (e.g., audio-visual character naming)



Detail on Hannah dataset and access to it can be obtained there:

https://research.technicolor.com/rennes/hannah-home/

https://research.technicolor.com/rennes/hannah-download/



Acknowledgments:

This work is supported by AXES EU project: http://www.axes-project.eu/










Alexey Ozerov Alexey.Ozerov@technicolor.com

Jean-Ronan Vigouroux,

Louis Chevallier

Patrick Pérez

Technicolor Research & Innovation



 

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Text to         Speech Synthesis:
      over an hour of speech       synthesis samples from         1968 to 2001 by       25 French, Canadian, US , Belgian,       Swedish, Swiss systems
     
      33 ans de synthèse de la parole à         partir du texte: une promenade sonore (1968-2001)
        (33 years of Text to Speech Synthesis       in French : an audio tour (1968-2001)       )
      Christophe d'Alessandro
      Article published in         Volume 42 - No. 1/2001 issue of  Traitement       Automatique des Langues  (TAL,       Editions Hermes),         pp. 297-321.
     
      posted to:
      http://groupeaa.limsi.fr/corpus:synthese:start

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Press Release - Immediate - Paris, France, December 13, 2013

Establishing the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN)

12 major NLP organisations announce the establishment of the ISLRN, a Persistent Unique Identifier, to be assigned to each Language Resource.

On November 18, 2013, 12 NLP organisations have agreed to announce the establishment of the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN), a Persistent Unique Identifier, to be assigned to each Language Resource. Experiment replicability, an essential feature of scientific work, would be enhanced by such unique identifier. Set up by ELRA, LDC and AFNLP/Oriental-COCOSDA, the ISLRN Portal will provide unique identifiers using a standardised nomenclature, as a service free of charge for all Language Resource providers. It will be supervised by a steering committee composed of representatives of participating organisations and enlarged whenever necessary.

More information on ELRA and the ISLRN, please contact: Khalid Choukri choukri@elda.org

More information on ELDA, please contact: Hélène Mazo mazo@elda.org

ELRA

55-57, rue Brillat Savarin

75013 Paris (France)

Tel.: +33 1 43 13 33 33

Fax: +33 1 43 13 33 30

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Speechocean March 2014 update:

Speechocean: A global language resources and data services supplier

has over 500 large-scale databases available in 110+ languages and accents with the platform of desktop, in-car, telephony and tablet PC. Our data repository is enormous and diversified, which includes ASR Databases, TTS Databases, Lexica, Text Corpora, etc.

Speechocean is glad to announce that more resources have been released:

ASR Databases

Speechocean provides 110+ regional languages corpora, available in a variety of formats, situational styles, scene environments and platform systems, covering In-car speech recognition corpora, mobile phone speech recognition corpora, fixed-line speech recognition corpora, desktop speech recognition corpora, etc. This month we released more Asian languages databases which were made for the tuning and testing purpose of speech recognition systems for speech ASR applications.

1. In-Car

Chinese Mandarin Speech Recognition Database ---- (In-Car)-100 Speakers

ID: King-ASR-122

This database was collected in China Mainland. It contains the voices of 100 different native speakers (50 males, 50 females) who were balanced according to age(mainly 18 – 30（62），31 – 45（28）,46 – 60（10）), gender (Male 50%, Female 50%) and regional accents (Northern 60%, Wu 10%, Xiang 5%, Gan 5%, Kejia 5%, Min 5%, Cantonese 10%).

The script was specially designed to provide material for both training and testing of many classes of speech recognizers which contain 320 utterances covering 15 categories and 35 sub-categories for each speaker (for the detail script structure design, please see the technical document).
Each speaker was recorded under two environments in three variations (Parked, City Driving and Highway driving) with various kinds of recording conditions such as motor running, fan on/off, window up/down, etc. 320 utterances were recorded for each speaker under two environments and there are 200796 utterances recorded in total.

Each utterance is stored in a separate file and each signal file is 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. All the data was transcribed and labeled.

Japanese Speech Recognition Database ---- (In-Car)-800 Speakers

ID: King-ASR-125

This Japan In-car Speech database was collected in Japan and contains the voices of 800 different native speakers who were demographically balanced according to Age (16-30, 31-45, and 46-60), Gender (400±5% males, 400±5% females) and Dialectical Region. The script was specially designed to provide material for both training and testing of many classes of speech recognizers which contains 16 general categories and more than 50 specific sub-categories. Each speaker was recorded under three driving environments (parked, city driving and highway driving) with recording conditions such as fan on/off and window up/down. A total of 300 utterances were recorded for each speaker in two of three driving environments (150 utterances and 10 spontaneous utterances per environment).

Four high quality audio channels (C1: SHURE SM10A, C2: SENNHEISER ME104, F1: AKG Q400, F2: AKG Q400) and three popular cars in the country were used in this recording.

The speech data is stored as sequences of 16 kHz, 16 bit which is uncompressed and each prompted utterance is stored in a separate file and each signal file is 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. All the data was transcribed and labeled.

2. Telephony

Japanese Speech Recognition Database ---- Conversation (Telephony)-201 Speakers

ID: King-ASR-055

This Japanese Speech Recognition database was collected in Japan and contains the voices of 201 different native speakers who were demographic balanced according to age distribution (16-28,29-60), Gender, Dialectical Regions. The corpus contains 100 pairs of spontaneous dialog speech data which were from 201 speakers. Each pair of speech consists of 3 audio files: two of them from single speaker separately and the other is from the mixed channel. The three files were recorded simultaneously. The pure recording time of mixed channel is about 104.8 hours. 33 topics were contained in this database.

There are 7,009 audio files which were saved as uncompressed PCM files. All the speech data was transcribed and labeled.

1.3 Mobile

Korean Speech Recognition Database—(Mobile)--1023 Speakers

ID: King-ASR-137

The Korean mobile speech Recognition database which was collected in Korea, contains the voices of 1023 different native speakers (510±5%males, 513±5% females) who were balanced according to age (mainly 16 – 30,31 – 45,46 – 60), Gender and regional accents (for the details, please see the technical document).

The script was specially designed to provide material for both training and testing of many classes of speech recognizers which contain 15 categories and 35 sub-categories for each speaker (for the detail script structure design, please see the technical document).

Each speaker has recorded 300 utterances under two environments, one in a quiet session (Office/Home) and one in a noisy session (Garden/roadside/restaurant/bus). Each speaker has recorded 150 utterances and spontaneous sentences per session and totally 300 utterances were recorded by each speaker.

Popular mobiles in this country were used for collecting this data such as Samsung, Nokia, HTC, etc. The speech data is stored as sequences of 16 kHz, 16 bit and uncompressed.
Each utterance is stored in a separate file and each signal file is accompanied by an ASCII SAM label file which contains the relevant descriptive information.

A pronunciation lexicon with a phonemic transcription is also included. All the data was transcribed and labeled

Chinese Mandarin Speech Recognition Database---Sentences (Mobile) - (5048 Speakers)

ID: King-ASR-216

This database is a desktop speech database collected by Speechocean which is performed in a quiet environment in China. This database is one of our databases of Speech Data ----Mobile Project (SDM) which contains the database collections in 30 languages presently.

This database contains 1,514,028 sentences of Chinese Mandarin speech data which were from 5048 speakers which were recorded in a quiet environment. The pure recording length is about 2,268 hours. All speakers are native speakers from 14 typical dialectical cities covering seven main dialectical regions of China who were demographic balanced according to age distribution (16~30, 31~45, 46~60), Gender (2,584 Males and 2464 Females) and regional accents.

The script was specially designed to provide material for both training and testing of many classes of speech recognizers. The script of each speaker contains 300 sentences which were randomly selected from a pool of sentences specially designed. Each speaker will be recorded as naturally as possible in quiet environment through Popular Mobile Phones such as of iPhones, HTC Samsung, MOTO and etc. which cover the platforms of ios, android and window mobile.

The speech data are stored as sequences of 16 kHz, 16 bit and uncompressed PCM format. All the speech was manually transcribed and labeled. A pronunciation lexicon with a phonemic transcription in Pinyin is also included.

4. Desktop

Indonesian Speech Recognition Database ---- Sentences (Desktop)-200 Speakers

ID: King-ASR-061

This Indonesian Speech Recognition database was collected in Indonesia and contains the voices of 200 different native speakers who were demographic balanced according to age distribution (16–30, 31–45, 46–60) and Gender. It contains 239267 audio files with about 460.94 hours of recording.

Each speaker uttered 300 sentences in a quiet office room. The whole data has been proofread manually with precise data labeling.

Urdu Speech Recognition Database ----Sentences (Desktop)-200 Speakers

ID: King-ASR-063

This Urdu Speech Recognition database, which was collected in Pakistan, contains the voices of 200 native speakers who were demographic balanced according to age distribution (16–60), gender, dialectical Regions, there were 241,354 audio files which were saved as uncompressed PCM files. All the speech data was transcribed and labeled.

Vietnamese Speech Recognition Database ----Sentences (Desktop)-200 Speakers

ID: King-ASR-074

This Vietnamese Speech Recognition database, which was collected in Vietnam, contains the voices of 200 native speakers who were demographic balanced according to age distribution (16–60), Gender, Dialectical Regions, there were 263,204 audio files which were saved as uncompressed PCM files. All the speech data was transcribed and labeled.

2. TTS Databases

Speechocean licenses a variety of databases in more than 40 languages for speech synthesis broadcasting speech, emotional speech, etc. which can be used in different algorithms.

European Portuguese Speech Corpus for TTS (Female)

ID: King-TTS-017

The European Portuguese (pt-PT) Speech Corpus consists native Portuguese female professional broadcaster (Female, 32 years old) recorded in a studio with high SNR (>35dB) over two channels (Shure SM15 microphone and Electroglottography (EGG) sensor).

The Corpus includes the following sub-corpora:

1. Sentence sub-corpus: including 3000 short sentences (7~12 words) and 2000 sentences with normal length (13~20 words). Considering all kinds of linguistic phenomena, all sentences are extracted from the daily articles in Portugal, such as national and international news, papers in life, travel, and so on. The sentences with political/religious/obscene/pornographic words which might lead to negative emotions are carefully excluded.

2. Emotional sub-corpus: including 100 exclamatory sentences and 100 interrogative sentences which can be used for emotional TTS study;

3. Digit sub-corpus: including many kinds of digits data, such as isolated digit, connected digits with blocks, natural and ordinal number readings;

4. Expression sub-corpus: consists of general expressions, such as date, time, money and measure expression;

5. Spell sub-corpus: including characters in alphabet, Greek characters and general abbreviations;

All reading prompts are manually revised and prosody annotations were made according to real speech. All speech data are segmented and labeled on phone level. Pronunciation lexicon and pitch extract from EEG can also be provided based on demands

3. Text Corpora

Speechocean licenses many kinds of text corpora in many languages which is superb for language model training.

4. Lexica

Speechocean builds pronunciation lexica in many languages which can be licensed to customers.

Contact Information

Xianfeng Cheng

Business Manager of Commercial Department

Tel: +86-10-62660928; +86-10-62660053 ext.8080

Cell phone: +86 13681432590

Skype: xianfeng.cheng1

Email: chengxianfeng@speechocean.com; cxfxy0cxfxy0@gmail.com

Website: www.speechocean.com

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Further to the establishment of the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN) as a unique and universal identification schema for Language Resources on November 18, 2013, ELRA, LDC and AFNLP/Oriental-COCOSDA now announce the opening of the ISLRN Portal (www.islrn.org). As a service free of charge for all Language Resource providers and under the supervision of a steering committee composed of representatives of participating organisations, the ISLRN Portal provides unique identifiers using a standardised nomenclature.

Overview
The 13-digit ISLRN format is: XXX-XXX-XXX-XXX-X. It can be allocated to any Language Resource; its composition is neutral and does not include any semantics in reference to the type or nature of the Language Resource. The ISLRN is a randomly created number with a check digit that validates a Verhoeff algorithm.

Two types of external players may interact with the ISLRN Portal: Visitors and Providers. Visitors may browse the web site and search for the ISLRN of a given Language Resource by its name or by its number if it exists. Providers are registered and own credentials. They can request a new ISLRN for a given Language Resource. A provider has the possibility to become certified, after moderation, in order to be able to import metadata in XML format.

The functionalities that can be accessed by Visitors are:

-          Identify a language resource according to its ISLRN
-          Identify an ISLRN by the name of a language resource
-          Get information about ISLRN, FAQ, Basic Metadata, Legal Information
-          View last 5 accepted resources (“What’s new” block on home page)
-          Sign up to become a provider

The functionalities that can be accessed by Providers, once they have signed up, are:

-          Log in
-          Request an ISLRN according to the metadata of a given resource
-          Request to become a certified provider so as to import XML files containing metadata
-          Import one or more metadata descriptions in XML to request ISLRN(s) (only for certified providers)
-          Edit pending requests
-          Access previous requests
-          Contact a Moderator or an Administrator
-          Edit Providers’ own profile

ISLRN request is handled by moderators within 5 working days.
Contact: islrn@elda.org

Background
The International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN) is a unique and universal identification schema for Language Resources which provides Language Resources with unique identifier using a standardised nomenclature. It also ensures that Language Resources are correctly identified, and consequently, recognised with proper references for their usage in applications in R&D projects, products evaluation and benchmark as well as in documents and scientific papers. Moreover, it is a major step in the interconnected world that Human Language Technologies (HLT) has become: unique resources must be identified as they are and meta-catalogues need a common identification format to manage data correctly.

The ISLRN does not intend to replace local and specific identifiers, it is not meant to be a legal deposit, not an obligation, but rather an essential and best practice. For instance a resource that is distributed by several data centres will still have the “local” data-centre identifier but will have a unique ISLRN.

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About ELRA
The European Language Resources Association (ELRA) is a non-profit making organisation founded by the European Commission in 1995, with the mission of providing a clearing house for language resources and promoting Human Language Technologies (HLT). To find out more about ELRA, please visit www.elra.info.

About LDC
Founded in 1992, the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) is an open consortium of universities, companies and government research laboratories. It creates, collects and distributes speech and text databases, lexicons, and other resources for research and development purposes. The University of Pennsylvania is the LDC's host institution. To find out more about LDC, please visit www.ldc.upenn.edu.

About AFNLP
The mission of the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP) is to promote and enhance R&D relating to the computational analysis and the automatic processing of all languages of importance to the Asian region by assisting and supporting like-minded organizations and institutions through information sharing, conference organization, research and publication co-ordination, and other forms of support. To find out more about AFNLP, please visit www.afnlp.org.

About Oriental-COCOSDA
The International Committee for the Co-ordination and Standardisation of Speech Databases and Assesment Techniques, Oriental-COCOSDA, has been established to encourage and promote international interaction and cooperation in the foundation areas of Spoken Language Processing, especially for Speech Input/Output. To find out more about Oriental-COCOSDA, please visit our web site: www.cocosda.org

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