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ISCApad #207 |
| Friday, September 25, 2015 by Chris Wellekens |
5-2-2 LDC Newsletter (August 2015)
In this newsletter: Fall 2015 LDC Data Scholarship program - September 15 deadline approaching 2013 Data Pack deadline is September 15 LDC co-organizes LSA2016 Pre-conference Workshop New publications: GALE Phase 3 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Speech Part 1 GALE Phase 3 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Transcripts Part 1 Fall 2015 LDC Data Scholarship program - September 15 deadline approaching Student applications for the Fall 2015 LDC Data Scholarship program are being accepted now through Tuesday, September 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. Applicants can email their materials to the LDC Data Scholarship program.
LDC will once again be exhibiting at Interspeech, held this year September 7-10 in Dresden, Germany. Stop by booth 20 to learn more about recent developments at the Consortium and new publications. Also, be on the lookout for the following presentations featuring LDC work:
LDC will post conference updates via our Twitter feed and Facebook page. We hope to see you there!
2013 Data Pack deadline is September 15 One month remains for not-for-profit and government organizations to create a custom data collection of eight corpora from among LDC’s 2013 releases. Selection options include: 1993-2007 United Nations Parallel Text, Chinese Treebank 8.0, CSC Deceptive Speech, GALE Arabic and Chinese speech and text releases, Greybeard, MADCAT training data, NIST 2012 Open Machine Translation (OpenMT) evaluation and progress sets, and more. The 2013 Data Pack is available for a flat rate of $3500 through September 15, 2015. To license the Data Pack and select eight corpora, login or register for an LDC user account and add the 2013 Data Pack and each of the eight data sets to your bin. Follow the check-out procedure, sign all applicable user agreements and select payment via wire transfer, purchase order or check. LDC will adjust the invoice total to reflect the data pack fee. To pay via credit card, add the 2013 Data Pack to your bin and check out using the system prompts. At the completion of the transaction, send an email to LDC indicating the eight data sets to include in your order.
LDC co-organizes LSA2016 Pre-conference Workshop University of Arizona’s Malcah Yeager-Dror and LDC’s Chris Cieri are organizing the upcoming LSA 2016 workshop “Preparing your Corpus for Archival Storage”. The session is sponsored by the National Science Foundation (BCS #1549994) and will be held on Thursday, January 7, 2016 in Washington, DC before the start of the 90th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA 2016). The workshop will examine critical factors which must be considered when preparing data for comparison and sharing following on the topics discussed in the LSA 2012 workshop, 'Coding for Sociolinguistic Archive Preparation'. Invited speakers will discuss specific coding conventions for such factors as socioeconomic and educational speaker demographics, language choice, stance and footing. There will be no additional registration fees to attend the session for those already taking part in the annual meeting. Students who are about to carry out their own fieldwork, or who have begun doing so, are eligible to apply for funding by November 2, 2015 to help defray the extra costs for attending the workshop. For more information about the speakers and topics, visit LDC’s workshop page.
New publications (1) Arabic Learner Corpus was developed at the University of Leeds and consists of written essays and spoken recordings by Arabic learners collected in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and 2013. The corpus includes 282,732 words in 1,585 materials, produced by 942 students from 67 nationalities studying at pre-university and university levels. The average length of an essay is 178 words. Two tasks were used to collect the written data, and participants had the choice to do one or both of them. In each of those tasks, learners were asked to write a narrative about a vacation trip and a discussion about the participant's study interest. Those choosing the first task generated a 40 minute timed essay without the use of any language reference materials. In the second task, participants completed the writing as a take-home assignment over two days and were permitted to use language reference materials. The audio recordings were developed by allowing students a limited amount of time to talk about the topics above without using language reference materials. The original handwritten essays were transcribed into an electronic text format. The corpus data consists of three types: (1) handwritten sheets scanned in PDF format; (2) audio recordings in MP3 format; and (3) textual unicode data in plain text and XML formats (including the transcribed audio and transcripts of the handwritten essays). The audio files are either 44100Hz 2-channel or 16000Hz 1-channel mp3 files. Arabic Learner Corpus is distributed via web download. 2015 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus provided that they have completed the license agreement. 2015 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$25.
* (2) GALE Phase 3 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Speech Part 1 was developed by LDC and is comprised of approximately 123 hours of Arabic broadcast conversation speech collected in 2007 by LDC, MediaNet, Tunis, Tunisia and MTC, Rabat, Morocco during Phase 3 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) program. Corresponding transcripts are released as GALE Phase 3 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Transcripts Part 1 (LDC2015T16). Broadcast audio for the GALE program was collected at LDC’s Philadelphia, PA USA facilities and at three remote collection sites. 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 conversation recordings in this release feature interviews, call-in programs and roundtable discussions focusing principally on current events from the following sources: Abu Dhabi TV, Al Alam News Channel, Al Arabiya, Aljazeera, Al Ordiniyah, Dubai TV, Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation, Oman TV, Saudi TV, and Syria TV. This release contains 149 audio files presented in FLAC-compressed Waveform Audio File format (.flac), 16000 Hz single-channel 16-bit PCM. GALE Phase 3 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Speech Part 1 is distributed via web download. 2015 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2015 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US$2000.
* (3) GALE Phase 3 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Transcripts Part 1 was developed by LDC and contains transcriptions of approximately 123 hours of Arabic broadcast conversation speech collected in 2007 by LDC, MediaNet, Tunis, Tunisia and MTC, Rabat, Morocco during Phase 3 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) program. Corresponding audio data is released as GALE Phase 3 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Speech Part 1 (LDC2015S11). The transcript files are in plain-text, tab-delimited format (TDF) with UTF-8 encoding, and the transcribed data totals 733,233 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. GALE Phase 3 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Transcripts Part 1 is distributed via web download. 2015 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2015 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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