In this newsletter:

Fall 2015 LDC Data Scholarship recipients

New publications:

ACE 2007 Spanish DevTest - Pilot Evaluation

GALE Phase 4 Chinese  Broadcast News Parallel Sentences

Karlsruhe Children's Text

Fall 2015 LDC Data Scholarship recipients

Congratulations to the recipients of LDC's Fall 2015 data scholarships:

Anthony Beylerian - Keio University (Japan), MSc, Informatics and Computer Science.  Anthony has been awarded a copy of OntoNotes for his work in word sense disambiguation.

Siti Binte Faizal - Newcastle University (UK), PhD candidate, Speech and Language Sciences.  Siti has been awarded a copy of Levantine Arabic QT Training Speech and Text for her work in psycholinguistics.

Sara El-Kafrawy - Ain Shams University (Egypt), MSc candidate, Computer and Information Sciences.  Sara has been awarded a copy of GALE Arabic English Word Alignment and Arabic Gigaword for her work in machine translation.

Marwa Hadj Salah - University of Sfax (Tunisia), PhD candidate, Computer Science.  Marwa has been awarded a copy of Arabic English Parallel News and Arabic News Translation Text for her work in machine translation.

Tomoaki Goto - University of Tokyo (Japan), PhD candidate, Linguistics.  Tomoaki has been awarded a copy of Arabic Newswire English Translation for his work in syntax.

Richard Metzger - Pennsylvania State University (USA), PhD candidate, Electrical Engineering.  Richard has been awarded a copy of 2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Training Part 2 and Test for his work in speaker recognition.

Jun Ren - Massey University (New Zealand), PhD, Engineering.  Jun has been awarded a copy of TORGO Dysarthric Articulation for his work in speaker recognition.

Gozde Sahin - Istanbul Technical University (Turkey), PhD candidate, Computer Engineering and Informatics.  Gozde has been been awarded a copy of 2009 CoNLL Parts 1 and 2 for her work in semantic role labeling.
            
Alexey Sholokhov - University of Eastern Finland (Finland), PhD candidate, Computer Sciences.  Alexey has been awarded a copy of RATS Speech Activity Detection for his work in speaker verification.
              
Stefan Watson - University of the West Indies (Jamaica),  PhD candidate, Physics.  Stefan has been awarded a copy of CMU Kids for his work in phonology and speech recognition.

For program information visit the Data Scholarship page.

New publications

(1) ACE 2007 Spanish DevTest - Pilot Evaluation was developed by LDC. This publication contains the complete set of Spanish development and test data to support the 2007 Automatic Content Extraction (ACE) technology evaluation, namely, newswire data annotated for entities and temporal expressions.

The objective of the ACE program was to develop automatic content extraction technology to support automatic processing of human language in text form from a variety of sources including newswire, broadcast programming and weblogs. In the 2007 evaluation, participants were tested on system performance for the recognition of entities, values, temporal expressions, relations, and events in Chinese and English and for the recognition of entities and temporal expressions in Arabic and Spanish. LDC's work in the ACE program is described in more detail on the LDC ACE project pages.

LDC has also released ACE 2007 Multilingual Training Corpus (LDC2014T18) which contains the Arabic and Spanish training data used in the 2007 evaluation.

The data consists of newswire material published in May 2005 from the following sources: Agence France Press, The Associated Press and Xinhua News Agency.

All files were annotated by two human annotators working independently. Discrepancies between the two annotations were adjudicated by a senior team member resulting in a gold standard file.

There are three annotation directories for each newswire story that contain an identical copy of the source text in SGML format and two associated annotated versions in XML format and tab delimited format. All text is UTF-8 encoded.

ACE 2007 Spanish DevTest - Pilot Evaluation 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$1000.

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(2) GALE Phase 4 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Sentences was developed by LDC. Along with other corpora, the parallel text in this release comprised training data for Phase 4 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) Program. This corpus contains Chinese source sentences and corresponding English translations selected from broadcast news data collected by LDC in 2008 and transcribed and translated by LDC or under its direction.

GALE Phase 4 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Sentences includes 40 source-translation document pairs, comprising 156,429 tokens of Chinese source text and its English translation. Data is drawn from eight distinct Chinese programs broadcast in 2008 from China Central TV, a national and international broadcaster in Mainland China; and Voice of America, a U.S. government-funded broadcast programmer. The programs in this release feature news programs on current events topics.

The data was 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. Sentences were selected for translation in two steps. First, files were chosen using sentence selection scripts provided by GALE program participants SRI International and IBM. The output was then manually reviewed by LDC staff to eliminate problematic sentences. Selected files were reformatted into a human-readable translation format and assigned to translation vendors. Translators followed LDC's Chinese to English translation guidelines and were provided with the full source documents containing the target sentences for their reference. 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.txt. All data are encoded in UTF-8.

GALE Phase 4 Chinese  Broadcast News Parallel Sentences 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$1750.

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(3) Karlsruhe Children's Text was developed by the Cooperative State University Baden-Württemberg, University of Education and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. It consists of over 14,000 freely written, German sentences from more than 1,700 school children in grades one through eight.

The data collection was conducted in 2011-2013 at elementary and secondary schools in and around Karlsruhe, Germany. Students were asked to write as verbose a text as possible. Those in grades one to four were read two stories and were then asked to write their own stories. Students in grades five through eight were instructed to write on a specific theme, such as 'Imagine the world in 20 years. What has changed?”. The goal of the collection was to use the data to develop a spelling error classification system.

Annotators converted the handwritten text into digital form with all errors committed by the writers; they also created an orthographically correct version of every sentence. Metadata about the text was gathered, including the circumstances under which it was collected, information about the student writer and background about spelling lessons in the particular class. In a second step, the students' spelling errors were annotated into general groupings: grapheme level, syllable level, morphology and syntax. The files were anonymized in a third step.

This release also contains metadata regarding the writers’ language biography, teaching methodology, age, gender and school year. The average age of the participants was 11 years, and the gender distribution was nearly equal. Original handwriting is presented as JPEG format image files and the converted annotated text as UTF-8 plain text. Metadata is contained within each text file.

Karlsruhe Children's Text 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$750.