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ISCApad #210 |
Sunday, December 13, 2015 by Chris Wellekens |
In this newsletter:
Invitation to Join for Membership Year (MY) 2016 Commercial use and LDC data LDC closed for Thanksgiving Break Articulation Index LSCP KHATT: Handwritten Arabic Text
Invitation to Join for Membership Year (MY) 2016 • New members as well as organizations who did not join for MY2015, but who held membership in any of the previous MYs (1993-2014), will also be eligible for a 5% discount provided that they join/renew before March 1, 2016.
Commercial use and LDC data For-profit organizations are reminded that an LDC membership is a pre-requisite for obtaining a commercial license to almost all LDC databases. Non-member organizations, including non-member for-profit organizations, cannot use LDC data to develop or test products for commercialization, nor can they use LDC data in any commercial product or for any commercial purpose. LDC data users should consult corpus-specific license agreements for limitations on the use of certain corpora. Visit our Licensing page for further information.
Spring 2016 Data Scholarship Program Applications are now being accepted through Friday, January 15, 2016 for the Spring 2016 LDC Data Scholarship program. 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.
(1) Articulation Index LSCP was developed by researchers at Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (LSCP), Ecole Normale Supérieure. It revises and enhances a subset of Articulation Index (AIC) (LDC2005S22), a corpus of persons speaking English syllables. Changes include the addition of forced alignment to sound files, time alignment of syllable utterances and format conversions. AIC consists of 20 American English speakers (12 males, 8 females) pronouncing syllables, some of which form actual words, but most of which are nonsense syllables. All possible Consonant-Vowel (CV) and Vowel-Consonant (VC) combinations were recorded for each speaker twice, once in isolation and once within a carrier-sentence, for a total of 25768 recorded syllables. Articulation Index LSCP alters AIC in the following ways. Time-alignments for the onset and offset of each word and syllable were generated through forced-alignment with a standard HMM-GMM (Hidden Markov Model-Gaussian Mixture Model) ASR system. The time-alignments for the beginning and end of the syllables (whether in isolation or within a carrier sentence) were manually adjusted. The time-alignments for the other words in carrier sentences were not manually adjusted. The recordings of isolated syllables were cut according to the manual time-alignments to remove the silent portions at the beginning and end, and the time-alignments were altered to correspond to the cut recordings. The file naming scheme was slightly altered for compatibility with the Kaldi speech recognition toolkit. AIC contains a wide-band (16 KHz, 16-bit PCM) and a narrow-band (8 KHz, 8 bit u-law) version of the recordings distributed in sphere format. The LSCP version contains the wide-band version only distributed as wave files. Articulation Index LSCP 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. This data is being made available at no-cost for non-member organizations under a research license. * (2) GALE Phase 4 Chinese Newswire 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 newswire data collected by LDC in 2008 and translated by LDC or under its direction. GALE Phase 4 Chinese Newswire Parallel Sentences includes 627 source-translation document pairs, comprising 90,434 tokens of Chinese source text and its English translation. Data is drawn from six distinct Chinese newswire sources. Sentences were selected for translation in two steps. First, files were chosen using sentence selection scripts. 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. GALE Phase 4 Chinese Newswire 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.
* (3) KHATT: Handwritten Arabic Text was developed by King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals, Technical University of Dortmund and Braunschweig University of Technology. It is comprised of scanned Arabic handwriting from 1,000 distinct male and female writers representing diverse countries, age groups, handedness and education levels. Participants produced text on a topic of their choice in an unrestricted style. KHATT was designed to promote research in areas such as text recognition and writer identification. The majority of participants were natives of Saudi Arabia; the next largest group was from a collection of regional countries (Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia and Yemen). Most writers were between 16-25 years of age with high school or university qualifications. KHATT: Handwritten Arabic Text is distributed on one USB drive. 2015 Subscription Members will automatically receive a copy 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$500.
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