March 2019 Newsletter

In this newsletter:

Call for Papers – LTC 2019, LREC 2020

New Publications:

CALLFRIEND Egyptian Arabic Second Edition

Penn Discourse Treebank Version 3.0

Call for Papers

The 9^th Language & Technology Conference (LTC 2019) will take place on May 17-19, 2019, at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Pozna?, Poland. LTC addresses Human Language Technologies as a challenge for computer science, linguistics, and related fields. Conference papers are due next week on Wednesday, March 20, 2019 (midnight, any time zone). For more information, visit the conference webpage.

The 12^th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020) will take place on May 13-15, 2020, at the Palais du Pharo in Marseille, France. LREC aims to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art, explore new R&D directions and emerging trends, and exchange information regarding language resources and their applications, evaluation methodologies, and tools. Conference papers are due by November 25, 2019. For more information, including conference topics, visit the conference webpage.

New publications:

(1) CALLFRIEND Egyptian Arabic Second Edition was developed by LDC and consists of approximately 25 hours of unscripted telephone conversations between native speakers of Egyptian Arabic. 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 Egyptian Arabic (LDC96S49).

All data were 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 Egyptian Arabic Second Edition is distributed via web download.

2019 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2019 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for $1,000. 

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(2) Penn Discourse Treebank Version 3.0 is the third release in the Penn Discourse Treebank project, the goal of which is to annotate the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) section of Treebank-2 (LDC95T7) with discourse relations. Penn Discourse Treebank Version 2 (LDC2008T05) contains over 40,600 tokens of annotated relations. In Version 3, an additional 13,000 tokens were annotated, certain pairwise annotations were standardized, new senses were included, and the corpus was subject to a series of consistency checks.

This corpus contains two tools: (1) The Annotator, used for annotation and adjudication, and which can also be used for viewing the corpus; and (2) The Conversion Tool for converting Version 2 annotation files into the Version 3 format.

The documentation directory contains a manual describing what is new in Version 3 and how Version 3 differs from Version 2; the methods and guidelines used in annotating PDTB Version 3; and a range of statistics on the tokens, including the frequency of each connective, its sense labels, and its modifiers. More information about the corpus and research carried out by the developers and others using the corpus can be found on the PDTB website.

Penn Discourse Treebank Version 3.0 is distributed via web download.

2019 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2019 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for $1,000. 

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(3) VAST Chinese Speech and Transcripts was developed by LDC for the VAST (Video Annotation for Speech Technologies) project and is comprised of approximately 29 hours of Mandarin Chinese audio extracted from amateur video content harvested from the web and corresponding time-aligned transcripts.

Audio files were transcribed using XTrans, which supports manual transcription across multiple channels, languages, and platforms. Transcribers followed a Quick-Rich Transcription style; transcription guidelines are included in this release.

The aim of the VAST project was to collect and annotate data in several languages to support the development of speech technologies such as speech activity detection, language identification, speaker identification, and speech recognition.

VAST Chinese Speech and Transcripts is distributed via web download.

2019 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2019 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for $1,000. 

Membership Office

Linguistic Data Consortium

University of Pennsylvania

T: +1-215-573-1275

E: ldc@ldc.upenn.edu

M: 3600 Market St. Suite 810

      Philadelphia, PA 19104

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