In this newsletter:

Invitation to Join for Membership Year (MY) 2016

Commercial use and LDC data

Spring 2016 Data Scholarship Program

LDC closed for Thanksgiving Break

New publications:

Articulation Index LSCP

GALE Phase 4 Chinese Newswire Parallel Sentences

KHATT: Handwritten Arabic Text

Invitation to Join for Membership Year (MY) 2016

Membership Year (MY) 2016 is open for joining.  We would like to invite all current and previous members of LDC to renew their membership as well as welcome new organizations to join the Consortium.  For MY2016, LDC is pleased to maintain membership fees at last year’s rates – membership fees will not increase.  Additionally, LDC will extend discounts on membership fees to members who keep their membership current and who join early in the year.

The details of our early renewal discounts for MY2015 are as follows:

           • Organizations who joined for MY2015 will receive a 10% discount when renewing before March 1, 2016. After March 1, 2016, MY2015 members are eligible for a 5% discount when renewing through the end of the year.

           • 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.

Publications for MY2016 are still being planned but we plan to release the following:

Arabic Treebank - Weblog ~ part-of-speech/morphological annotation and syntactic tree annotation of web text from various sources

BOLT ~ all phases, languages, genres, tasks

DEFT ~ Spanish and Chinese resources

Digital Archive of Southern Speech - NLP Version ~ colloquial speech in the Southern United States; NLP version normalizes filenames and formats

GALE Phase 3 and 4 data ~ all tasks and languages   

HAVIC ~ amateur video and transcripts

NewSoMe Corpus of Opinion in Blogs ~ opinion annotated English and Spanish blogs

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.

The application consists of two parts:

(1) Data Use Proposal. Applicants must submit a proposal describing their intended use of the data. The proposal should state which data the student plans to use and how the data will benefit their research project as well as information on the proposed methodology or algorithm.

(2) Letter of Support. Applicants must submit one letter of support from their thesis adviser or department chair. The letter must verify the student's need for data and confirm that the department or university lacks the funding to pay the full nonmember fee for the data or to join the Consortium.

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 Scholarship program. Decisions will be sent by email from the same address.

The deadline for the Spring 2016 program cycle is January 15, 2016.

LDC closed for Thanksgiving Break

LDC will be closed on Thursday, November 26, 2015 and Friday, November 27, 2015 in observance of the US Thanksgiving Holiday.  Our offices will reopen on Monday, November 30, 2015.

New publications

(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.

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(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.

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(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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Appen ButlerHill 

A global leader in linguistic technology solutions

RECENT CATALOG ADDITIONS—MARCH 2012

1. Speech Databases

1.1 Telephony

2. Pronunciation Lexica

Appen Butler Hill has considerable experience in providing a variety of lexicon types. These include:

 Pronunciation Lexica providing phonemic representation, syllabification, and stress (primary and secondary as appropriate)

 Part-of-speech tagged Lexica providing grammatical and semantic labels

 Other reference text based materials including spelling/mis-spelling lists, spell-check dictionar-ies, mappings of colloquial language to standard forms, orthographic normalization lists.

Over a period of 15 years, Appen Butler Hill has generated a significant volume of licensable material for a wide range of languages. For holdings information in a given language or to discuss any customized development efforts, please contact: sales@appenbutlerhill.com

4. Other Language Resources

 Morphological Analyzers – Farsi/Persian & Urdu

 Arabic Thesaurus

 Language Analysis Documentation – multiple languages

For additional information on these resources, please contact: sales@appenbutlerhill.com

5. Customized Requests and Package Configurations

Appen Butler Hill is committed to providing a low risk, high quality, reliable solution and has worked in 130+ languages to-date supporting both large global corporations and Government organizations.

We would be glad to discuss to any customized requests or package configurations and prepare a cus-tomized proposal to meet your needs.

                                                         www.appenbutlerhill.com

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We are happy to announce the release of DEMAND, a set of real-world
16-channel noise recordings designed for the evaluation of microphone
array processing techniques.

http://www.irisa.fr/metiss/DEMAND/

1.5 h of noise data were recorded in 18 different indoor and outdoor
environments and are available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

Joachim Thiemann (CNRS - IRISA)
Nobutaka Ito (University of Tokyo)
Emmanuel Vincent (Inria Nancy - Grand Est)

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Aide à la finalisation de corpus oraux ou multimodaux pour diffusion, valorisation et dépôt pérenne

Le consortium IRCOM de la TGIR Corpus et l’EquipEx ORTOLANG s’associent pour proposer une aide technique et financière à la finalisation de corpus de données orales ou multimodales à des fins de diffusion et pérennisation par l’intermédiaire de l’EquipEx ORTOLANG. Cet appel ne concerne pas la création de nouveaux corpus mais la finalisation de corpus existants et non-disponibles de manière électronique. Par finalisation, nous entendons le dépôt auprès d’un entrepôt numérique public, et l’entrée dans un circuit d’archivage pérenne. De cette façon, les données de parole qui ont été enrichies par vos recherches vont pouvoir être réutilisées, citées et enrichies à leur tour de manière cumulative pour permettre le développement de nouvelles connaissances, selon les conditions d’utilisation que vous choisirez (sélection de licences d’utilisation correspondant à chacun des corpus déposés).

Cet appel d’offre est soumis à plusieurs conditions (voir ci-dessous) et l’aide financière par projet est limitée à 3000 euros. Les demandes seront traitées dans l’ordre où elles seront reçues par l’ IRCOM. Les demandes émanant d’EA ou de petites équipes ne disposant pas de support technique « corpus » seront traitées prioritairement. Les demandes sont à déposer du 1^er septembre 2013 au 31 octobre 2013. La décision de financement relèvera du comité de pilotage d’IRCOM. Les demandes non traitées en 2013 sont susceptibles de l’être en 2014. Si vous avez des doutes quant à l’éligibilité de votre projet, n’hésitez pas à nous contacter pour que nous puissions étudier votre demande et adapter nos offres futures.

Pour palier la grande disparité dans les niveaux de compétences informatiques des personnes et groupes de travail produisant des corpus, L’ IRCOM propose une aide personnalisée à la finalisation de corpus. Celle-ci sera réalisée par un ingénieur IRCOM en fonction des demandes formulées et adaptées aux types de besoin, qu’ils soient techniques ou financiers.

Les conditions nécessaires pour proposer un corpus à finaliser et obtenir une aide d’IRCOM sont :

• Pouvoir prendre toutes décisions concernant l’utilisation et la diffusion du corpus (propriété intellectuelle en particulier).

• Disposer de toutes les informations concernant les sources des corpus et le consentement des personnes enregistrées ou filmées.

• Accorder un droit d’utilisation libre des données ou au minimum un accès libre pour la recherche scientifique.

Les demandes peuvent concerner tout type de traitement : traitements de corpus quasi-finalisés (conversion, anonymisation), alignement de corpus déjà transcrits, conversion depuis des formats « traitement de textes », digitalisation de support ancien. Pour toute demande exigeant une intervention manuelle importante, les demandeurs devront s’investir en moyens humains ou financiers à la hauteur des moyens fournis par IRCOM et ORTOLANG.

IRCOM est conscient du caractère exceptionnel et exploratoire de cette démarche. Il convient également de rappeler que ce financement est réservé aux corpus déjà largement constitués et ne peuvent intervenir sur des créations ex-nihilo. Pour ces raisons de limitation de moyens, les propositions de corpus les plus avancés dans leur réalisation pourront être traitées en priorité, en accord avec le CP d’IRCOM. Il n’y a toutefois pas de limite « théorique » aux demandes pouvant être faites, IRCOM ayant la possibilité de rediriger les demandes qui ne relèvent pas de ses compétences vers d’autres interlocuteurs.

Les propositions de réponse à cet appel d’offre sont à envoyer à ircom.appel.corpus@gmail.com. Les propositions doivent utiliser le formulaire de deux pages figurant ci-dessous. Dans tous les cas, une réponse personnalisée sera renvoyée par IRCOM.

Ces propositions doivent présenter les corpus proposés, les données sur les droits d’utilisation et de propriétés et sur la nature des formats ou support utilisés.

Cet appel est organisé sous la responsabilité d’IRCOM avec la participation financière conjointe de IRCOM et l’EquipEx ORTOLANG.

Pour toute information complémentaire, nous rappelons que le site web de l'Ircom (http://ircom.corpus-ir.fr) est ouvert et propose des ressources à la communauté : glossaire, inventaire des unités et des corpus, ressources logicielles (tutoriaux, comparatifs, outils de conversion), activités des groupes de travail, actualités des formations, ...

L'IRCOM invite les unités à inventorier leur corpus oraux et multimodaux - 70 projets déjà recensés - pour avoir une meilleure visibilité des ressources déjà disponibles même si elles ne sont pas toutes finalisées.

Le comité de pilotage IRCOM

Utiliser ce formulaire pour répondre à l’appel : Merci.

Réponse à l’appel à la finalisation de corpus oral ou multimodal

Nom du corpus :

Nom de la personne à contacter :

Adresse email :

Numéro de téléphone :

Nature des données de corpus :

Existe-t’il des enregistrements :

Quel média ? Audio, vidéo, autre…

Quelle est la longueur totale des enregistrements ? Nombre de cassettes, nombre d’heures, etc.

Quel type de support ?

Quel format (si connu) ?

Existe-t’il des transcriptions :

Quel format ? (papier, traitement de texte, logiciel de transcription)

Quelle quantité (en heures, nombre de mots, ou nombre de transcriptions) ?

Disposez vous de métadonnées (présentation des droits d’auteurs et d’usage) ?

Disposez-vous d’une description précise des personnes enregistrées ?

Disposez-vous d’une attestation de consentement éclairé pour les personnes ayant été enregistrées ? En quelle année (environ) les enregistrements ont eu lieu ?

Quelle est la langue des enregistrements ?

Le corpus comprend-il des enregistrements d’enfants ou de personnes ayant un trouble du langage ou une pathologie ?

Si oui, de quelle population s’agit-il ?

Dans un souci d’efficacité et pour vous conseiller dans les meilleurs délais, il nous faut disposer d’exemples des transcriptions ou des enregistrements en votre possession. Nous vous contacterons à ce sujet, mais vous pouvez d’ores et déjà nous adresser par courrier électronique un exemple des données dont vous disposez (transcriptions, métadonnées, adresse de page web contenant les enregistrements).

Nous vous remercions par avance de l’intérêt que vous porterez à notre proposition. Pour toutes informations complémentaires veuillez contacter Martine Toda martine.toda@ling.cnrs.fr ou à ircom.appel.corpus@gmail.com.

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Rhapsodie: un Treebank prosodique et syntaxique de français parlé

Nous avons le plaisir d'annoncer que la ressource Rhapsodie, Corpus de français parlé annoté pour la prosodie et la syntaxe, est désormais disponible sur http://www.projet-rhapsodie.fr/

Le treebank Rhapsodie est composé de 57 échantillons sonores (5 minutes en moyenne, au total 3h de parole, 33000 mots) dotés d’une transcription orthographique et phonétique alignées au son.

Il s'agit d’une ressource de français parlé multi genres (parole privée et publique ; monologues et dialogues ; entretiens en face à face vs radiodiffusion, parole plus ou moins interactive et plus ou moins planifiée, séquences descriptives, argumentatives, oratoires et procédurales) articulée autour de sources externes (enregistrements extraits de projets antérieurs, en accord avec les concepteurs initiaux) et internes. Nous tenons en particulier à remercier les responsables des projets CFPP2000, PFC, ESLO, C-Prom ainsi que Mathieu Avanzi, Anne Lacheret, Piet Mertens et Nicolas Obin.

Les échantillons sonores (wave & MP3, pitch nettoyé et lissé), les transcriptions orthographiques (txt), les annotations macrosyntaxiques (txt), les annotations prosodiques (xml, textgrid) ainsi que les metadonnées (xml & html) sont téléchargeables librement selon les termes de la licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d’utilisation commerciale - Partage dans les mêmes conditions 3.0 France.

Les annotations microsyntaxiques seront disponibles prochainement

 Les métadonnées sont également explorables en ligne grâce à un browser.

 Les tutoriels pour la transcription, les annotations et les requêtes sont disponibles sur le site Rhapsodie.

 Enfin, L’annotation prosodique est interrogeable en ligne grâce au langage de requêtes Rhapsodie QL.

 L'équipe Ressource Rhapsodie (Modyco, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre)

Sylvain Kahane, Anne Lacheret, Paola Pietrandrea, Atanas Tchobanov, Arthur Truong.

 Partenaires : IRCAM (Paris), LATTICE (Paris), LPL (Aix-en-Provence), CLLE-ERSS (Toulouse).

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Rhapsodie: a Prosodic and Syntactic Treebank for Spoken French

We are pleased to announce that Rhapsodie, a syntactic and prosodic treebank of spoken French created with the aim of modeling the interface between prosody, syntax and discourse in spoken French is now available at   http://www.projet-rhapsodie.fr/

The Rhapsodie treebank is made up of 57 short samples of spoken French (5 minutes long on average, amounting to 3 hours of speech and a 33 000 word corpus) endowed with an orthographical phoneme-aligned transcription . 

The corpus is representative of different genres (private and public speech; monologues and dialogues; face-to-face interviews and broadcasts; more or less interactive discourse; descriptive, argumentative and procedural samples, variations in planning type).

The corpus samples have been mainly drawn from existing corpora of spoken French and partially created within the frame of theRhapsodie project. We would especially like to thank the coordinators of the  CFPP2000, PFC, ESLO, C-Prom projects as well as Piet Mertens, Mathieu Avanzi, Anne Lacheret and Nicolas Obin.

The sound samples (waves, MP3, cleaned and stylized pitch), the orthographic transcriptions (txt), the macrosyntactic annotations (txt), the prosodic annotations  (xml, textgrid) as well as the metadata (xml and html) can be freely downloaded under the terms of the Creative Commons licence Attribution - Noncommercial - Share Alike 3.0 France.

Microsyntactic annotation will be available soon.

The metadata are  searchable on line through a browser.

The prosodic annotation can be explored on line through the Rhapsodie Query Language.

The tutorials of transcription, annotations and Rhapsodie Query Language  are available on the site.

The Rhapsodie team (Modyco, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre :

Sylvain Kahane, Anne Lacheret, Paola Pietrandrea, Atanas Tchobanov, Arthur Truong.

Partners: IRCAM (Paris), LATTICE (Paris), LPL (Aix-en-Provence),CLLE-ERSS (Toulouse).

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We have created and made publicly available a dense audio-visual person-oriented ground-truth annotation of a feature movie (100 minutes long): “Hannah and her sisters” by Woody Allen.

The annotation includes

•          Face tracks in video (densely annotated, i.e., in each frame, and person-labeled)

•             Speech segments in audio (person-labeled)

•             Shot boundaries in video



The annotation can be useful for evaluating



•   Person-oriented video-based tasks (e.g., face tracking, automatic character naming, etc.)

•             Person-oriented audio-based tasks (e.g., speaker diarization or recognition)

•             Person-oriented multimodal-based tasks (e.g., audio-visual character naming)



Detail on Hannah dataset and access to it can be obtained there:

https://research.technicolor.com/rennes/hannah-home/

https://research.technicolor.com/rennes/hannah-download/



Acknowledgments:

This work is supported by AXES EU project: http://www.axes-project.eu/










Alexey Ozerov Alexey.Ozerov@technicolor.com

Jean-Ronan Vigouroux,

Louis Chevallier

Patrick Pérez

Technicolor Research & Innovation



 

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Text to         Speech Synthesis:
      over an hour of speech       synthesis samples from         1968 to 2001 by       25 French, Canadian, US , Belgian,       Swedish, Swiss systems
     
      33 ans de synthèse de la parole à         partir du texte: une promenade sonore (1968-2001)
        (33 years of Text to Speech Synthesis       in French : an audio tour (1968-2001)       )
      Christophe d'Alessandro
      Article published in         Volume 42 - No. 1/2001 issue of  Traitement       Automatique des Langues  (TAL,       Editions Hermes),         pp. 297-321.
     
      posted to:
      http://groupeaa.limsi.fr/corpus:synthese:start

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Press Release - Immediate - Paris, France, December 13, 2013

Establishing the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN)

12 major NLP organisations announce the establishment of the ISLRN, a Persistent Unique Identifier, to be assigned to each Language Resource.

On November 18, 2013, 12 NLP organisations have agreed to announce the establishment of the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN), a Persistent Unique Identifier, to be assigned to each Language Resource. Experiment replicability, an essential feature of scientific work, would be enhanced by such unique identifier. Set up by ELRA, LDC and AFNLP/Oriental-COCOSDA, the ISLRN Portal will provide unique identifiers using a standardised nomenclature, as a service free of charge for all Language Resource providers. It will be supervised by a steering committee composed of representatives of participating organisations and enlarged whenever necessary.

More information on ELRA and the ISLRN, please contact: Khalid Choukri choukri@elda.org

More information on ELDA, please contact: Hélène Mazo mazo@elda.org

ELRA

55-57, rue Brillat Savarin

75013 Paris (France)

Tel.: +33 1 43 13 33 33

Fax: +33 1 43 13 33 30

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Further to the establishment of the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN) as a unique and universal identification schema for Language Resources on November 18, 2013, ELRA, LDC and AFNLP/Oriental-COCOSDA now announce the opening of the ISLRN Portal (www.islrn.org). As a service free of charge for all Language Resource providers and under the supervision of a steering committee composed of representatives of participating organisations, the ISLRN Portal provides unique identifiers using a standardised nomenclature.

Overview
The 13-digit ISLRN format is: XXX-XXX-XXX-XXX-X. It can be allocated to any Language Resource; its composition is neutral and does not include any semantics in reference to the type or nature of the Language Resource. The ISLRN is a randomly created number with a check digit that validates a Verhoeff algorithm.

Two types of external players may interact with the ISLRN Portal: Visitors and Providers. Visitors may browse the web site and search for the ISLRN of a given Language Resource by its name or by its number if it exists. Providers are registered and own credentials. They can request a new ISLRN for a given Language Resource. A provider has the possibility to become certified, after moderation, in order to be able to import metadata in XML format.

The functionalities that can be accessed by Visitors are:

-          Identify a language resource according to its ISLRN
-          Identify an ISLRN by the name of a language resource
-          Get information about ISLRN, FAQ, Basic Metadata, Legal Information
-          View last 5 accepted resources (“What’s new” block on home page)
-          Sign up to become a provider

The functionalities that can be accessed by Providers, once they have signed up, are:

-          Log in
-          Request an ISLRN according to the metadata of a given resource
-          Request to become a certified provider so as to import XML files containing metadata
-          Import one or more metadata descriptions in XML to request ISLRN(s) (only for certified providers)
-          Edit pending requests
-          Access previous requests
-          Contact a Moderator or an Administrator
-          Edit Providers’ own profile

ISLRN request is handled by moderators within 5 working days.
Contact: islrn@elda.org

Background
The International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN) is a unique and universal identification schema for Language Resources which provides Language Resources with unique identifier using a standardised nomenclature. It also ensures that Language Resources are correctly identified, and consequently, recognised with proper references for their usage in applications in R&D projects, products evaluation and benchmark as well as in documents and scientific papers. Moreover, it is a major step in the interconnected world that Human Language Technologies (HLT) has become: unique resources must be identified as they are and meta-catalogues need a common identification format to manage data correctly.

The ISLRN does not intend to replace local and specific identifiers, it is not meant to be a legal deposit, not an obligation, but rather an essential and best practice. For instance a resource that is distributed by several data centres will still have the “local” data-centre identifier but will have a unique ISLRN.

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About ELRA
The European Language Resources Association (ELRA) is a non-profit making organisation founded by the European Commission in 1995, with the mission of providing a clearing house for language resources and promoting Human Language Technologies (HLT). To find out more about ELRA, please visit www.elra.info.

About LDC
Founded in 1992, the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) is an open consortium of universities, companies and government research laboratories. It creates, collects and distributes speech and text databases, lexicons, and other resources for research and development purposes. The University of Pennsylvania is the LDC's host institution. To find out more about LDC, please visit www.ldc.upenn.edu.

About AFNLP
The mission of the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP) is to promote and enhance R&D relating to the computational analysis and the automatic processing of all languages of importance to the Asian region by assisting and supporting like-minded organizations and institutions through information sharing, conference organization, research and publication co-ordination, and other forms of support. To find out more about AFNLP, please visit www.afnlp.org.

About Oriental-COCOSDA
The International Committee for the Co-ordination and Standardisation of Speech Databases and Assesment Techniques, Oriental-COCOSDA, has been established to encourage and promote international interaction and cooperation in the foundation areas of Spoken Language Processing, especially for Speech Input/Output. To find out more about Oriental-COCOSDA, please visit our web site: www.cocosda.org

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Speechocean – update (December 2015):

Speechocean: A global language resources and data services supplier

About Speechocean

Speechocean is one of the world well-known language related resources & services provider in the fields of Human Computer Interaction and Human Language Technology. At present, we can provide data services with 110+ languages and dialects across the world.

KingLine Data Center ---Data Sharing Platform

Kingline Data Center is operated and supervised by Speechocean, which is mainly focused on language resources creating and providing for research and development of human language technology.

These diversified corpora are widely used for the research and development in the fields of Speech Recognition, Speech Synthesis, Natural Language Processing, Machine Translation, Web Search, etc. All corpora are openly accessible for users all over the world, including users from scientific research institutions, enterprises or individuals.

For more detailed information, please visit our website: http://kingline.speechocean.com

New released corpora:

1. Canadian English Speech Recognition Database -(Desktop)-202 Speakers

ID: King-ASR-140

This is a 4-channel Canada English desktop speech database, which is collected over 4 different microphones simultaneously. This database is owned by Beijing Haitian Ruisheng Science Technology Ltd (SpeechOcean, www.speechocean.com).

The prompts were the phonetically rich sentences. The raw sentences are all selected from the News and Twitter domain. We did remove a number of sentences that includes offensive or negative words or phrase. Finally, we had 30000 unique sentences in our list of sentences, that we generated the prompt sheets from with no more than 3 times for each. All audio files were manually transcribed and annotated by our native transcribing team based on the Transcribing conventions; a strict evaluation work was made on all the transcribing files by our QA Team. A professional transcription tool was developed by SpeechOcean to support this transcription work and some new short-cut functions were embedded into the tool such as the button for the non-speech acoustic events.

This database is performed in quiet office environment. The corpus contains the recordings of 322,936 utterances of English speech data which were from 202 speakers. The pure recording time is about 380hours (4-channel), including the leading silence (about 500 ms) and the trailing silence (about 500 ms). The total size of this database is 121 GB.

A pronunciation lexicon with a phonemic transcription in SAMPA was carefully made by covering all the words in the transcription files.

2. Argentinean Spanish Speech Recognition Database(Desktop)-200 Speakers

ID: King-ASR-281

This is a 4-channel Spanish desktop speech database, which is collected over 4 different microphones simultaneously. The project was performed in Argentina; cover all the cities, for example: BuenosAires, Cordoba, Lanus, Cordoba...

Each Speaker was recorded around 300 sentences which were selected from a pool of phonetically rich sentences in approximate 80 minutes as natural as possible. The recording was performed in a quiet office environment.

This database is performed in quiet office environment. The corpus contains the recordings of 236,232 utterances of Spanish speech data which were from 200 speakers. The pure recording time is about 358 hours (4-channel), including the leading silence (about 500 ms) and the trailing silence (about 500 ms). The total size of this database is 141 GB.

A pronunciation lexicon with a phonemic transcription in SAMPA was carefully made by covering all the words in the transcription files.

3. Chilean Spanish Speech Recognition Database -(Mobile)-300 Speakers

ID: King-ASR-290

This is a 3-channel Chilean Spanish speech database, which is collected over 3 different mobile operating systems: iOS, Android and Windows Phone platform. The project was performed in Chile, cover all the main cities. For example: Santiago, Rancagua, Antofagasta and Viña.
300 speakers were recorded in total, and each speaker recorded in a quiet environment.
The prompts were the phonetically rich sentences. The raw sentences are all selected from the News domain Twitter/Forum and SMS. We did remove a number of sentences that includes offensive or negative words or phrase. Finally, we had 108055 unique sentences in our list of sentences, that we generated the prompt sheets from with no more than 3 times for each.
With discarding some unqualified utterances, the whole corpus contains the recordings of 268,704 utterances; the pure recording time is about 519 hours (including leading silence and tail silence). The total size of this database is about 55.8 G.

Contact Information

Xianfeng Cheng

VP

Tel: +86-10-62660928; +86-10-62660053 ext.8080

Mobile: +86 13681432590

Skype: xianfeng.cheng1

Email: chengxianfeng@speechocean.com; cxfxy0cxfxy0@gmail.com

Website: www.speechocean.com

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kidLUCID: London UCL Children’s Clear Speech in Interaction Database

We are delighted to announce the availability of a new corpus of spontaneous speech for children aged 9 to 14 years inclusive, produced as part of the ESRC-funded project on ‘Speaker-controlled Variability in Children's Speech in Interaction’ (PI: Valerie Hazan).

Speech recordings (a total of 288 conversations) are available for 96 child participants (46M, 50F, range 9;0 to 15;0 years), all native southern British English speakers. Participants were recorded in pairs while completing the diapix spot-the-difference picture task in which the pair verbally compared two scenes, only one of which was visible to each talker. High-quality digital recordings were made in sound-treated rooms. For each conversation, a stereo audio recording is provided with each speaker on a separate channel together with a Praat Textgrid containing separate word- and phoneme-level segmentations for each speaker.

There are six recordings per speaker pair made in the following conditions:

• NOB (No barrier): both speakers heard each other normally

• VOC (Vocoder): one conversational partner heard the other's speech after it had been processed in real time through a noise-excited three channel vocoder

• BAB (Babble): one conversational partner heard the other's speech in a background of adult multi-talker babble at an approximate SNR of 0 dB.

The kidLUCID corpus is available online within the OSCAAR (Online Speech/Corpora Archive and Analysis Resource) archive (https://oscaar.ci.northwestern.edu/). Free access can be requested for research purposes. Further information about the project can be found at: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/pals/research/shaps/research/shaps/research/clear-speech-strategies

This work was supported by Economic and Social Research Council Grant No. RES-062- 23-3106.

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We are happy to announce the release of a table of 44 publicly available robust speech processing datasets and a table of 4 ASR software tools on the wiki of ISCA's Robust Speech Processing SIG:
https://wiki.inria.fr/rosp/Datasets#Speech_datasets
https://wiki.inria.fr/rosp/Software#Automatic_speech_recognition

We hope that these tables will promote wider dissemination of the datasets and software tools available in our community and help newcomers select the most suitable dataset or software for a given experiment. We plan to provide additional tables on, e.g., room impulse response datasets or speaker recognition software in the future.

We highly welcome your input, especially additional tables/entries and reproducible baselines for each dataset. It just takes a few minutes thanks to the simple wiki interface.

For more information about joining the SIG and contributing, see
https://wiki.inria.fr/rosp/

Jonathan Le Roux, Emmanuel Vincent, and Ramon Astudillo

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ELRA and LDC partner to implement ISLRN process and assign identifiers to all the Language Resources in their catalogues.

Following the meeting of the largest NLP organizations, the NLP12, and their endorsement of the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN), ELRA and LDC partnered to implement the ISLRN process and to assign identifiers to all the Language Resources (LRs) in their catalogues. The ISLRN web portal was designed to enable the assignment of unique identifiers as a service free of charge for all Language Resource providers. To enhance the use of ISLRN, ELRA and LDC have collaborated to provide the ISLRN 13-digit ID to all the Language Resources distributed in their respective catalogues. Anyone who is searching the ELRA and LDC catalogues can see that each Language Resource is now identified by both the data centre ID and the ISLRN number. All providers and users of such LRs should refer to the latter in their own publications and whenever referring to the LR.

ELRA and LDC will continue their joint involvement in ISLRN through active participation in this web service.

Visit the ELRA and LDC catalogues, respectively at http://catalogue.elra.info and https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu

Background

The International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN) aims to provide unique identifiers using a standardised nomenclature, thus ensuring that LRs are correctly identified, and consequently, recognised with proper references for their usage in applications within R&D projects, product evaluation and benchmarking, as well as in documents and scientific papers. Moreover, this is a major step in the networked and shared world that Human Language Technologies (HLT) has become: unique resources must be identified as such and meta-catalogues need a common identification format to manage data correctly.

The ISLRN portal can be accessed from http://www.islrn.org,

***About NLP12***

Representatives of the major Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics organizations met in Paris on 18 November 2013 to harmonize and coordinate their activities within the field.
The results of this coordination are expressed in the Paris Declaration: http://www.elra.info/NLP12-Paris-Declaration.html.

*** About ELRA ***
The European Language Resources Association (ELRA) is a non-profit making organisation founded by the European Commission in 1995, with the mission of providing a clearing house for language resources and promoting Human Language Technologies (HLT).
To find out more about ELRA, please visit our web site: http://www.elra.info

*** About LDC ***

The Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) is an open consortium of universities, libraries, corporations and research laboratories that creates and distributes linguistic resources for language-related education, research and technology development.

To find out more about LDC, please visit our web site: https://www.ldc.upenn.edu


For more information, please contact: admin@islrn.org

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*****************************************************************
ELRA - Language Resources Catalogue - Update
*****************************************************************

Visit our On-line Catalogue: http://catalog.elra.info
Visit the Universal Catalogue: http://universal.elra.info
Archives of ELRA Language Resources Catalogue Updates: http://www.elra.info/en/catalogues/language-resources-announcements/

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JRC, the EC's Joint Research Centre, an important LR player: First to adopt the ISLRN initiative

The Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission's in house science service, is the first organisation to use the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN) initiative and has requested ISLRN 13-digit unique identifiers to its Language Resources (LR).
Thus, anyone who is using JRC LRs may now refer to this number in their own publications.

The current JRC LRs (downloadable from https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/language-technologies) with an ISLRN ID are:

• DGT-Acquis, ISLRN: 393-866-130-658-2
• DGT-TM, ISLRN: 710-653-952-884-4
• EAC-TM, ISLRN: 589-927-543-547-4
• ECDC-TM, ISLRN: 476-596-396-497-8
• English sentiment quotes, ISLRN: 574-735-957-886-6
• JRC-Acquis, ISLRN: 821-325-977-001-1
• JRC-Names, ISLRN: 328-863-023-410-2
• Multilingual summary evaluation data, ISLRN: 762-292-165-648-8
• Turkish Tweet Named Entity annotation, ISLRN: 764-177-227-350-7

Background

The International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN) aims to provide unique identifiers using a standardised nomenclature, thus ensuring that LRs are correctly identified, and consequently, recognised with proper references for their usage in applications within R&D projects, product evaluation and benchmarking, as well as in documents and scientific papers. Moreover, this is a major step in the networked and shared world that Human Language Technologies (HLT) has become: unique resources must be identified as such and meta-catalogues need a common identification format to manage data correctly.
The ISLRN portal can be accessed from http://www.islrn.org,

*** About the JRC ***

As the Commission's in-house science service, the Joint Research Centre's mission is to provide EU policies with independent, evidence-based scientific and technical support throughout the whole policy cycle.
Within its research in the field of global security and crisis management, the JRC develops open source intelligence and analysis systems that can automatically harvest and analyse a huge amount of multi-lingual information from the internet-based sources. In this context, the JRC has developed Language Technology resources and tools that can be used for highly multilingual text analysis and cross-lingual applications.
To find out more about JRC's research in open source information monitoring, please visit https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/research-topic/internet-surveillance-systems. To access media monitoring applications directly, go to http://emm.newsbrief.eu/overview.html.

*** About ELRA ***
The European Language Resources Association (ELRA) is a non-profit making organisation founded by the European Commission in 1995, with the mission of providing a clearing house for language resources and promoting Human Language Technologies (HLT).
To find out more about ELRA, please visit our web site: http://www.elra.info

For more information, contact admin@ilsrn.org
 

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Forensic database of voice recordings of 500+ Australian English speakers

We are pleased to announce that the forensic database of voice recordings of 500+ Australian English speakers is now published.

The database was collected by the Forensic Voice Comparison Laboratory, School of Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications, University of New South Wales as part of the Australian Research Council funded Linkage Project on making demonstrably valid and reliable forensic voice comparison a practical everyday reality in Australia. The project was conducted in partnership with: Australian Federal Police,  New South Wales Police,  Queensland Police, National Institute of Forensic Sciences, Australasian Speech Sciences and Technology Association, Guardia Civil, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.

The database includes multiple non-contemporaneous recordings of most speakers. Each speaker is recorded in three different speaking styles representative of some common styles found in forensic casework. Recordings are recorded under high-quality conditions and extraneous noises and crosstalk have been manually removed. The high-quality audio can be processed to reflect recording conditions found in forensic casework.

The database can be accessed at: http://databases.forensic-voice-comparison.net/

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Audio and Electroglottographic speech recordings from several languages

We are happy to announce the public availability of speech recordings made as part of the UCLA project 'Production and Perception of Linguistic Voice Quality'.

http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/voiceproject/voice.html

Audio and EGG recordings are available for Bo, Gujarati, Hmong, Mandarin, Black Miao, Southern Yi, Santiago Matatlan/ San Juan Guelavia Zapotec; audio recordings (no EGG) are available for English and Mandarin. Recordings of Jalapa Mazatec extracted from the UCLA Phonetic Archive are also posted. All recordings are accompanied by explanatory notes and wordlists, and most are accompanied by Praat textgrids that locate target segments of interest to our project.

Analysis software developed as part of the project – VoiceSauce for audio analysis and EggWorks for EGG analysis – and all project publications are also available from this site. All preliminary analyses of the recordings using these tools (i.e. acoustic and EGG parameter values extracted from the recordings) are posted on the site in large data spreadsheets.

All of these materials are made freely available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike-3.0 Unported License.

This project was funded by NSF grant BCS-0720304 to Pat Keating, Abeer Alwan and Jody Kreiman of UCLA, and Christina Esposito of Macalester College.

Pat Keating (UCLA)

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Press Release - Immediate - Paris, France, April 2, 2015

Opening of the ELRA License Wizard

ELRA announces the opening of the License Wizard @ http://wizard.elda.org.

ELRA  is deploying a License Wizard to:

• support the right-holders in finding the appropriate licenses under which to share/distribute their Language Resources, and
• clarify the legal obligations applicable in various licensing situations.

Currently, the License Wizard allows the user to choose among several licenses that exist for the use of Language Resources: ELRA, Creative Commons and META-SHARE.
More will be added.

The License Wizard works as a web configurator that helps Right Holders/Users:

- to select a number of legal features and obtain the user license adapted to their selection.
- to define which user licenses they would like to select in order to distribute their Language Resources.
- to integrate the user license terms into a Distribution Agreement that could be proposed to ELRA or META-SHARE  for further distribution through the ELRA Catalogue of Language Resources (http://catalogue.elra.info,  www.meta-share.eu).

Background
From the very beginning, ELRA has come across all types of legal issues that arise when exchanging and sharing Language Resources. The association has devoted huge efforts to streamline the licensing processes while continuously monitoring the impacts of regulation changes on the HLT community activities. The first major step was to come up with a few licenses for both the research and the industrial sectors to use the resources available within the ELRA catalogue. Recently, its strong involvement in the META-SHARE infrastructure led to designing and drafting a small set of licenses, inspired by the ELRA licenses but also accounting for the new trends of permissive licenses and free resources, represented in particular by the Creative Commons.

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We are making 24 GB of a new dataset, called Kara One, freely available. This database combines 3 modalities (EEG, face tracking, and audio) during imagined and articulated speech using phonologically-relevant phonemic and single-word prompts. It is the result of a collaboration between the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute (in the University Health Network) and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.

In the associated paper (abstract below), we show how to accurately classify imagined phonological categories solely from EEG data. Specifically, we obtain up to 90% accuracy in classifying imagined consonants from imagined vowels and up to 95% accuracy in classifying stimulus from active imagination states using advanced deep-belief networks.

Data from 14 participants are available here: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~complingweb/data/karaOne/karaOne.html.

If you have any questions, please contact Frank Rudzicz at frank@cs.toronto.edu.

Best regards,

Frank

PAPER Shunan Zhao and Frank Rudzicz (2015) Classifying phonological categories in imagined and articulated speech. In Proceedings of ICASSP 2015, Brisbane Australia

ABSTRACT This paper presents a new dataset combining 3 modalities (EEG, facial, and audio) during imagined and vocalized phonemic and single-word prompts. We pre-process the EEG data, compute features for all 3 modalities, and perform binary classi?cation of phonological categories using a combination of these modalities. For example, a deep-belief network obtains accuracies over 90% on identifying consonants, which is signi?cantly more accurate than two baseline supportvectormachines. Wealsoclassifybetweenthedifferent states (resting, stimuli, active thinking) of the recording, achievingaccuraciesof95%. Thesedatamaybeusedtolearn multimodal relationships, and to develop silent-speech and brain-computer interfaces.

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