In this newsletter:

Fall 2014 LDC Data Scholarship program- September 15 deadline approaching

Neural Engineering Data Consortium publishes first release

New publications:

GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast News Speech Part 1

GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast News Transcripts Part 1

TAC KBP Reference Knowledge Base

Fall 2014 LDC Data Scholarship program- September 15 deadline approaching!

Student applications for the Fall 2014 LDC Data Scholarship program are being accepted now through Monday, September 15, 2014, 11:59PM EST.  The LDC Data Scholarship program provides university students with access to LDC data at no cost.  This program is open to students pursuing both undergraduate and graduate studies in an accredited college or university. LDC Data Scholarships are not restricted to any particular field of study; however, students must demonstrate a well-developed research agenda and a bona fide inability to pay. 

Students will need to complete an application which consists of a data use proposal and letter of support from their adviser.  For further information on application materials and program rules, please visit the LDC Data Scholarship page. 

Applicants can email their materials to the LDC Data Scholarship program. Decisions will be sent by email from the same address.

Neural Engineering Data Consortium publishes first release

The Neural Engineering Data Consortium (NEDC) has announced its first release, the Temple University Hospital Electroencephalogram (TUH EEG) corpus.  TUH EEG corpus is a database of over 20,000 EEG recordings which will aid the development of technology to automatically interpret EEG scans. NEDC, directed by Professors Iyad Obeid and Joe Picone of Temple University, Philadelphia, PA USA , designs, collects and distributes data and resources in support of neural engineering research

NEDC is surveying community needs to help set priorities for future effort. You can complete the survey here.

New publications

(1) GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast News Speech Part 1 was developed by LDC and is comprised of approximately 165 hours of Arabic broadcast news speech collected in 2006 and 2007 by LDC, MediaNet, Tunis, Tunisia and MTC, Rabat, Morocco during Phase 2 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) Program. Corresponding transcripts are released as GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast News Transcripts Part 1 (LDC2014T17).

Broadcast audio for the GALE program was collected at LDC’s Philadelphia, PA USA facilities and at three remote collection sites: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong King (Chinese), Medianet (Tunis, Tunisia) (Arabic), and MTC (Rabat, Morocco) (Arabic). The combined local and outsourced broadcast collection supported GALE at a rate of approximately 300 hours per week of programming from more than 50 broadcast sources for a total of over 30,000 hours of collected broadcast audio over the life of the program.

The broadcast recordings in this release feature news programs focusing principally on current events from the following sources: Abu Dhabi TV, a televisions station based in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; Al Alam News Channel, based in Iran; Alhurra, a U.S. government-funded regional broadcaster; Aljazeera, a regional broadcaster located in Doha, Qatar; Dubai TV, a broadcast station in the United Arab Emirates; Al Iraqiyah, an Iraqi television station; Kuwait TV, a national broadcast station in Kuwait; Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation, a Lebanese television station; Nile TV, a broadcast programmer based in Egypt; Saudi TV, a national television station based in Saudi Arabia; and Syria TV, the national television station in Syria.

This release contains 200 audio files presented in FLAC-compressed Waveform Audio File format (.flac), 16000 Hz single-channel 16-bit PCM. Each file was audited by a native Arabic speaker following Audit Procedure Specification Version 2.0 which is included in this release. The broadcast auditing process served three principal goals: as a check on the operation of the broadcast collection system equipment by identifying failed, incomplete or faulty recordings; as an indicator of broadcast schedule changes by identifying instances when the incorrect program was recorded; and as a guide for data selection by retaining information about a program’s genre, data type and topic.

GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast News Speech Part 1 is distributed on three DVD-ROM.

2014 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this data.  2014 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for US$2000.

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(2) GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast News Transcripts Part 1 was developed by LDC and contains transcriptions of approximately 165 hours of Arabic broadcast news speech collected in 2006 and 2007 by LDC, MediaNet, Tunis, Tunisia and MTC, Rabat, Morocco during Phase 2 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) program. Corresponding audio data is released as GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast News Speech Part 1 (LDC2014S07).

The transcript files are in plain-text, tab-delimited format (TDF) with UTF-8 encoding, and the transcribed data totals 897,868 tokens. The transcripts were created with the LDC-developed transcription tool, XTrans, a multi-platform, multilingual, multi-channel transcription tool that supports manual transcription and annotation of audio recordings. 

The files in this corpus were transcribed by LDC staff and/or by transcription vendors under contract to LDC. Transcribers followed LDC's quick transcription guidelines (QTR) and quick rich transcription specification (QRTR) both of which are included in the documentation with this release. QTR transcription consists of quick (near-)verbatim, time-aligned transcripts plus speaker identification with minimal additional mark-up. It does not include sentence unit annotation. QRTR annotation adds structural information such as topic boundaries and manual sentence unit annotation to the core components of a quick transcript. Files with QTR as part of the filename were developed using QTR transcription. Files with QRTR in the filename indicate QRTR transcription.

GALE Phase 2 Arabic Broadcast News Transcripts 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$1500.

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(3) TAC KBP Reference Knowledge Base was developed by LDC in support of the NIST-sponsored TAC-KBP evaluation series. It is a knowledge base built from English Wikipedia articles and their associated infoboxes and covers over 800,000 entities.

TAC (Text Analysis Conference) is a series of workshops organized by NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) to encourage research in natural language processing and related applications by providing a large test collection, common evaluation procedures, and a forum for researchers to share their results. TAC's KBP track (Knowledge Base Population) encourages the development of systems that can match entities mentioned in natural texts with those appearing in a knowledge base and extract novel information about entities from a document collection and add it to a new or existing knowledge base.

Consult the LDC TAC-KBP project page for further information about LDC's resource development for the TAC-KBP program.

The source data, Wikipedia infoboxes and articles, was taken from an October 2008 snapshot of Wikipedia.

TAC KBP Reference Knowledge Base contains a set of entities, each with a canonical name and title for the Wikipedia page, an entity type, an automatically parsed version of the data from the infobox in the entity's Wikipedia article, and a stripped version of the text of the Wiki article. Each entity is assigned one of four types: PER (person), ORG (organization), GPE (geo-political entity) and UKN (unknown). All data files are presented as UTF-8 encoded XML.

TAC KBP Reference Knowledge Base is distributed on one DVD-ROM.

2014 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this data.  2014 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for US$100.