In this newsletter:

Fall 2018 Data Scholarship Program

New Publications:

CALLFRIEND Mandarin Chinese-Mainland Dialect Second Edition

RATS Language Identification

TRAD Chinese-French Parallel Text – Broadcast News

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Fall 2018 LDC Data Scholarship Program

Student applications for the Fall 2018 LDC Data Scholarship program are being accepted now through September 15, 2018. This scholarship program provides university students with access to LDC data at no cost. Students must complete an application which consists of a data use proposal and letter of support from their advisor.

For application requirements and program rules, please visit the LDC Data Scholarship page.

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New publications:

(1) CALLFRIEND Mandarin Chinese-Mainland Dialect Second Edition was developed by LDC and consists of approximately 24 hours of unscripted telephone conversations between native speakers of the Mandarin Chinese dialect spoken in mainland China. This second edition updates the audio files to wav format, simplifies the directory structure and adds documentation and metadata. The first edition is available as CALLFRIEND Mandarin Chinese-Mainland Dialect (LDC96S55).

All data was collected before July 1997. Participants could speak with a person of their choice on any topic; most called family members and friends. All calls originated in North America. The recorded conversations last up to 30 minutes.

CALLFRIEND Mandarin Chinese-Mainland Dialect Second Edition is distributed via web download.

2018 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus. 2018 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) RATS Language Identification was developed by LDC and is comprised of approximately 5,400 hours of Levantine Arabic, Farsi, Dari, Pashto and Urdu conversational telephone speech with annotation of speech segments. The corpus was created to provide training, development and initial test sets for the Language Identification (LID) task in the DARPA RATS (Robust Automatic Transcription of Speech) program.

The source audio consists of conversational telephone speech recordings from: (1) conversational telephone speech (CTS) recordings, taken either from previous LDC CTS corpora, or from CTS data collected specifically for the RATS program from Levantine Arabic, Pashto, Urdu, Farsi and Dari native speakers; and (2) portions of VOA broadcast news recordings, taken from data used in the 2009 NIST Language Recognition Evaluation. The 2009 LRE Test Set is available from LDC as LDC2014S06.

CTS recordings were audited by annotators who listened to short segments and determined whether the audio was in the target language. Annotations on the audio files include start time, end time, speech activity detection (SAD) label, SAD provenance, language ID and LID provenance.

RATS Language Identification is distributed via hard drive.

2018 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus. 2018 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US $7500.

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(3) TRAD Chinese-French Parallel Text -- Broadcast News was developed by ELDA as part of the PEA-TRAD project. It contains French translations of a subset of approximately 30,000 Chinese characters from GALE Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text - Part 3 (LDC2008T18). The purpose of the PEA-TRAD project (Translation as a Support for Document Analysis) was to develop speech-to-speech translation technology for multiple languages (e.g., Arabic, Chinese, Pashto) from a variety of domains.

This release consists of 977 segments (translation units) from 139 documents. The Chinese source file contains 33,571 characters and the French reference translation contains 22,424 words.  The source data is Chinese broadcast news collected and translated into English by LDC for the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) program. Information about the ELDA translation team, translation guidelines and validation results is contained in the documentation accompanying this release.

TRAD Chinese-French Parallel Text – Broadcast News is distributed via web download.

2018 Subscription Members will receive copies of this corpus provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. 2018 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for US $350.

Membership Office

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E: ldc@ldc.upenn.edu

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