In this newsletter:

Renew your LDC membership today

Spring 2015 LDC Data Scholarship Program - deadline approaching

Reduced fees for Treebank-2 and Treebank-3

LDC to close for Winter Break

New publications:

Benchmarks for Open Relation Extractions

Fisher and CALLHOME Spanish--English Speech Translation

GALE Phase 3 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Speech Part 1

GALE Phase 3 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Transcripts Part 1

Renew your LDC membership today

Membership Year 2015 (MY2015) discounts are available for those who keep their membership current and  join early in the year. Check here for further information including our planned publications for MY2015.

Now is also a good time to consider joining LDC for the current and open membership years, MY2014 and MY2013. MY2014 offers members an impressive 37 publications which include UN speech data, 2009 NIST LRE test set, 2007 ACE multilingual data, and multi-channel WSJ audio. MY2013  remains open through the end of the 2014 calendar year and its publications include Mixer 6 speech, Greybeard, UN parallel text and CSC Deceptive Speech as well as updates to Chinese Treebank and Chinese Proposition Bank. For full descriptions of these data sets, visit our Catalog.

Spring 2015 LDC Data Scholarship Program - deadline approaching

The deadline for the Spring 2015 LDC Data Scholarship Program is right around the corner! Student applications are being accepted now through January 15, 2015, 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.

Students can email their applications to the LDC Data Scholarships program. Decisions will be sent by email from the same address.

Reduced fees for Treebank-2 and Treebank-3

Treebank-2 (LDC95T7) and Treebank-3 (LDC99T42) are now available to non-members at reduced fees, US$1500 for Treebank-2 and US$1700 for Treebank-3, reductions of 52% and 47%, respectively.

LDC to close for Winter Break

LDC will be closed from December 25, 2014 through January 2, 2015 in accordance with the University of Pennsylvania Winter Break Policy. Our offices will reopen on January 5, 2015. Requests received for membership renewals and corpora during the Winter Break will be processed at that time.

Best wishes for a relaxing holiday season!


New publications

(1) Benchmarks for Open Relation Extraction was developed by the University of Alberta and contains annotations for approximately 14,000 sentences from The New York Times Annotated Corpus (LDC2008T19) and Treebank-3 (LDC99T42). This corpus was designed to contain benchmarks for the task of open relation extraction (ORE), along with sample extractions from ORE methods and evaluation scripts for computing a method's precision and recall.

ORE attempts to extract as many relations as described in a corpus without relying on relation-specific training data. The traditional approach to relation extraction requires substantial training effort for each relation of interest. That can be unpractical for massive collections such as found on the web. Open relation extraction offers an alternative by extracting unseen relations as they come. It does not require training data for any particular relation, making it suitable for applications that require a large (or even unknown) number of relations. Results published in ORE literature are often not comparable due to the lack of reusable annotations and differences in evaluation methodology. The goal of this benchmark data set is to provide annotations that are flexible and can be used to evaluate a wide range of methods.

Binary and n-ary relations were extracted from the text sources. Sentences were annotated for binary relations manually and automatically. In the manual sentence annotation, two entities and a trigger (a single token indicating a relation) were identified for the relation between them, if one existed. A window of tokens allowed to be in a relation was specified; that included modifiers of the trigger and prepositions connecting triggers to their arguments. For each sentence annotated with two entities, a system must extract a string representing the relation between them. The evaluation method deemed an extraction as correct if it contained the trigger and allowed tokens only. The automatic annotator identified pairs of entities and a trigger of the relation between them; the evaluation script for that experiment deemed an extraction correct if it contained the annotated trigger. For n-ary relations, sentences were annotated with one relation trigger and all of its arguments. An extracted argument was deemed correct if it was annotated in the sentence.

Benchmarks for Open Relation Extractions is distributed via web download.

2014 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this data provided they have completed a copy of the user agreement.  2014 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for US$300.

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(2) Fisher and CALLHOME Spanish--English Speech Translation was developed at Johns Hopkins University and contains English reference translations and speech recognizer output (in various forms) that complement the LDC Fisher Spanish (LDC2010T04) and CALLHOME Spanish audio and transcript releases (LDC96T17). Together, they make a four-way parallel text dataset representing approximately 38 hours of speech, with defined training, development, and held-out test sets.

The source data are the Fisher Spanish and CALLOME Spanish corpora developed by LDC, comprising transcribed telephone conversations between (mostly native) Spanish speakers in a variety of dialects. The Fisher Spanish data set consists of 819 transcribed conversations on an assortment of provided topics primarily between strangers, resulting in approximately 160 hours of speech aligned at the utterance level, with 1.5 million tokens. The CALLHOME Spanish corpus comprises 120 transcripts of spontaneous conversations primarily between friends and family members, resulting in approximately 20 hours of speech aligned at the utterance level, with just over 200,000 words (tokens) of transcribed text.

Translations were obtained by crowdsourcing using Amazon's Mechanical Turk, after which the data was split into training, development, and test sets. The CALLHOME data set defines its own data splits, organized into train, devtest, and evltest, which were retained here. For the Fisher material, four data splits were produced: a large training section and three test sets. These test sets correspond to portions of the data where four translations exist.

Fisher and CALLHOME Spanish--English Speech Translation 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$500.

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(3) GALE Phase 3 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Speech Part 1 was developed by LDC and is comprised of approximately 126 hours of Mandarin Chinese broadcast conversation speech collected in 2007 by LDC and Hong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong, during Phase 3 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) Program.

Corresponding transcripts are released as GALE Phase 3 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Transcripts Part 1 (LDC2014T28).

Broadcast audio for the GALE program was collected at LDC’s Philadelphia, PA USA facilities and at three remote collection sites: HKUST (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. HKUST collected Chinese broadcast programming using its internal recording system and a portable broadcast collection platform designed by LDC and installed at HKUST in 2006.

The broadcast conversation recordings in this release feature interviews, call-in programs, and roundtable discussions focusing principally on current events from the following sources: Anhui TV, a regional television station in Anhui Province, China; Beijing TV, a national television station in China; China Central TV (CCTV), a Chinese national and international broadcaster; Hubei TV, a regional broadcaster in Hubei Province, China; and Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong-based satellite television station.

This release contains 217 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 Chinese 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 3 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Speech Part 1 is distributed on 2 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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(4) GALE Phase 3 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Transcripts Part 1 was developed by LDC and contains transcriptions of approximately 126 hours of Chinese broadcast conversation speech collected in 2007 by LDC and Hong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong, during Phase 3 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) Program.

Corresponding audio data is released as GALE Phase 3 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Speech Part 1 (LDC2014S09).

The source broadcast conversation recordings feature interviews, call-in programs and roundtable discussions focusing principally on current events from the following sources: Anhui TV, a regional television station in Anhui Province, China; Beijing TV, a national television station in China; China Central TV (CCTV), a Chinese national and international broadcaster; Hubei TV, a regional television station in Hubei Province, China; and Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong-based satellite television station.

The transcript files are in plain-text, tab-delimited format (TDF) with UTF-8 encoding, and the transcribed data totals 1,556,904 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. XTrans is available from the following link, https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/language-resources/tools/xtrans .

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 3 Chinese Broadcast Conversation 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.