In this newsletter:

Renew your LDC membership today
Spring 2017 LDC Data Scholarship Program - deadline approaching
LDC to close for Winter Break

New publications:

Bamanankan Lexicon

IARPA Babel Tagalog Language Pack IARPA-babel106-v0.2g

TAC KBP Spanish Cross-lingual Entity Linking - Comprehensive Training and Evaluation Data 2012-2014

Renew your LDC membership today

Membership Year 2017 (MY2017) is open for joining and discounts are available for those who keep their membership current and join early in the year. Now through March 1, 2017, current MY2016 members who renew before March 1, will receive a 10% discount off of the membership fee. New or returning organizations will receive a 5% discount through March 1. 

In addition to receiving new publications, current year LDC members also enjoy the benefit of licensing older data at reduced costs from our Catalog of almost 700 holdings; current year for-profit members may use most data for commercial applications.

Plans for MY2017 publications are in progress. Among the expected releases are:

• 2010 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation data set
• Multilanguage conversational telephone speech: developed to support language identification research in related languages
• UCLA High Speed Laryngeal Database: audio recordings and high-speed video endoscopic images of the vocal folds while sustaining vowels
• Noisy TIMIT: TIMIT with added artificial noise
• CHiME shared task data: noisy read WSJ speech
• First Year Law Students’ Memoranda: memos to a hypothetical court with annotations
• IARPA Babel Language Packs: languages include Vietnamese, Haitian Creole, Zulu, Kazakh and Lithuanian
• BOLT: source, parallel and word-aligned data in all languages
• RATS Keyword Spotting data set
• GALE Phases 3 and 4: all tasks and languages   

And don’t forget, MY2016 and MY2015 are still open for joining. MY2015 can be joined through December 31, 2016 and includes data such as RATS Speech Activity Detection and updates to Penn Treebank. MY 2016 will remain open through December 31, 2017 and includes data such as BOLT Chinese Discussion Forums, IARPA Babel Language Packs and Multi-Language Conversational Telephone Speech – Slavic Group. For full descriptions of these data sets, visit our Catalog.  

Visit Join LDC for details on membership, user accounts and payment.

Spring 2017 LDC Data Scholarship Program - deadline approaching

Students can apply for the Spring 2017 Data Scholarship Program now through January 16, 2017, 11:59PM EST. The LDC Data Scholarship program provides undergraduate and graduate students with access to LDC data at no cost.

For more information on application requirements and program rules, please visit LDC Data Scholarships. Students can email their applications to the LDC Data Scholarships program. Decisions will be sent by email from the same address.

LDC to close for Winter Break

LDC will be closed from Monday, December 26, 2016 through Monday, January 2, 2017 in accordance with the University of Pennsylvania Winter Break Policy. Our offices will reopen on Tuesday, January 3, 2017. Requests received for membership renewals and corpora during the Winter Break will not be processed until the week of January 3.

New Corpora

(1) Bamanankan Lexicon was developed by LDC and contains 5,978 entries of the Bamanankan language presented as a Bamanankan-English lexicon and a Bamanankan-French lexicon. It is the third publication in an LDC project to build an electronic dictionary of three Mandekan languages: Mawukakan, Maninkakan and Bamanankan. These are Eastern Manding languages in the Mande Group of the Niger-Congo language family. LDC released a Mawukakan Lexicon (LDC2005L01) in 2005 and a Maninkakan Lexicon (LDC2013L01) in 2013.

This lexicon is presented using a Latin-based transcription system because the Latin alphabet is familiar to the majority of Mandekan language speakers and it is expected to facilitate the work of researchers interested in this resource.

Bamanankan Lexicon is distributed via web download.

2016 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus. 2016 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US $800.

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(2) IARPA Babel Tagalog Language Pack IARPA-babel106-v0.2g was developed by Appen for the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) Babel program. It contains approximately 213 hours of Tagalog conversational and scripted telephone speech collected in 2012 along with corresponding transcripts.

The Babel program focuses on underserved languages and seeks to develop speech recognition technology that can be rapidly applied to any human language to support keyword search performance over large amounts of recorded speech.

The Tagalog speech in this release represents that spoken in the North, Central and South dialect regions in the Philippines. The gender distribution among speakers is approximately equal; speakers' ages range from 16 years to 65 years. Calls were made using different telephones (e.g., mobile, landline) from a variety of environments including the street, a home or office, a public place, and inside a vehicle.

Transcripts are encoded in UTF-8.

IARPA Babel Tagalog Language Pack IARPA-babel106-v0.2g is distributed via web download.

2016 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. 2016 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US $25.

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(3) TAC KBP Spanish Cross-lingual Entity Linking - Comprehensive Training and Evaluation Data 2012-2014 was developed by LDC and contains training and evaluation data produced in support of the TAC KBP Spanish Cross-lingual Entity Linking tasks in 2012, 2013 and 2014. It includes queries and gold standard entity type information, Knowledge Base links, and equivalence class clusters for NIL entities along with the source documents for the queries, specifically, English and Spanish newswire, discussion forum and web data. The corresponding knowledge base is available as TAC KBP Reference Knowledge Base (LDC2014T16).

More information about the TAC KBP Entity Linking task and other TAC KBP evaluations can be found on the NIST TAC website.

TAC KBP Spanish Cross-lingual Entity Linking - Comprehensive Training and Evaluation Data 2012-2014 is distributed via web download.

2016 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus. 2016 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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(4) GALE Phase 4 Arabic Newswire Parallel Sentences was developed by LDC and contains Modern Standard Arabic source text and corresponding English translations selected from newswire data collected by LDC in 2008 and translated by LDC or under its direction.

This release includes 393 source-translation document pairs drawn from six distinct newswire sources, comprising 62,669 tokens of Arabic source text and its English translation. Source data and translations are distributed in TDF format. All data is encoded in UTF-8.

GALE Phase 4 Arabic Newswire Parallel sentences is distributed via web download.

2016 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus. 2016 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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