In this newsletter: (November 2019)

Join LDC for Membership Year 2020
Spring 2020 Data Scholarship Program

New Publications:

DEFT English Committed Belief Annotation
CALLFRIEND American English-Non-Southern Dialect Second Edition
TAC KBP Cold Start - Comprehensive Evaluation Data 2012-2017
IARPA Babel Amharic Language Pack IARPA-babel307b-v1.0b

Join LDC for Membership Year 2020

Membership Year 2020 (MY2020) is open and discounts are available for those who keep their membership current and join early in the year. Now through March 2, 2020, current MY2019 members who renew their LDC membership before March 2 will receive a 10% discount off the membership fee. New or returning organizations will receive a 5% discount through March 2.

In addition to receiving new publications, current LDC members also enjoy the benefit of licensing older data at reduced costs from our Catalog of over 800 holdings. Current-year for-profit members may use most data for commercial applications.

Plans for MY2020 publications are in progress. Among the expected releases are:

• Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) Annotation Release 3.0: semantic treebank of over 59,000 English natural language sentences from broadcast conversations, newswire, weblogs and web discussion forums; updates the second version (LDC2017T10) with new annotations
• TAC KBP: English sentiment slot filling, surprise slot filling, nugget detection and coreference, and event argument data in all languages (English, Chinese and Spanish)
• DEFT Chinese ERE: Chinese discussion forum data annotated for entities, relations and events
• LibriVox Spanish: 73 hours of Spanish audiobook read speech and transcripts
• IARPA Babel Language Packs (telephone speech and transcripts): languages include Dhuluo, Javanese and Mongolian
• HAVIC Med Training data: web video, metadata, and annotations for developing multimedia systems
• RATS Speaker Identification: conversational telephone speech in Levantine Arabic, Pashto, Urdu, Farsi and Dari on degraded audio signals with annotation of speech segments for speaker identification
• BOLT: discussion forums, SMS/chat, conversational telephone speech, word-aligned, tagged and co-reference data in all languages (Chinese, Egyptian Arabic, and English)
  
  

New publications:

(1) DEFT English Committed Belief Annotation was developed by LDC and consists of approximately 950,000 words of English discussion forum text annotated for 'committed belief,' which marks the level of commitment displayed by the author to the truth of the propositions expressed in the text.

DARPA's Deep Exploration and Filtering of Text (DEFT) program aimed to address remaining capability gaps in state-of-the-art natural language processing technologies related to inference, causal relationships, and anomaly detection. LDC supported the DEFT program by collecting, creating, and annotating a variety of data sources.

DEFT English Committed Belief Annotation 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 $2000.

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(2) CALLFRIEND American English-Non-Southern Dialect Second Edition was developed by LDC and consists of approximately 26 hours of unscripted telephone conversations between native speakers of non-Southern dialects of American English. 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 American English-Non-Southern Dialect (LDC96S46).

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 American English-Non-Southern Dialect 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 $1000.

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(3) TAC KBP Cold Start - Comprehensive Evaluation Data 2012-2017 was developed by LDC and contains Chinese, English, and Spanish data produced in support of the TAC KBP Cold Start evaluation track conducted from 2012 to 2017. This corpus includes source documents, queries, assessments, manual runs, and final assessments.

In the Cold Start track, systems were evaluated on their ability to construct a new knowledge base (KB) from information provided in a text collection in combination with technologies developed in other TAC KBP tracks -- slot filling, information extraction, question answering, and entity discovery and linking. Cold Start systems were required to find all entities in the text, and the KB must have ideally included every person, organization, and geo-political entity as well as all the targeted relations between them. To facilitate the evaluation of those KBs, LDC annotators created sets of queries, human-generated responses to the queries, and assessments of both human and system responses.

The source data in this release is comprised of English and Spanish newswire and web text collected by LDC for the 2012, 2014, and 2015 evaluations, and the 2016 pilot collection. The source collections for the 2016 and 2017 evaluations, which include Chinese data, are available in TAC KBP Evaluation Source Corpora 2016-2017 (LDC2019T12). The archived 2013 Cold Start source data collection is available from NIST upon request.

TAC KBP Cold Start - Comprehensive Evaluation Data 2012-2017 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 $1000.

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(4) IARPA Babel Amharic Language Pack IARPA-babel307b-v1.0b was developed by Appen for the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) Babel program. It contains approximately 204 hours of Amharic conversational and scripted telephone speech collected in 2014 along with corresponding transcripts.

The Amharic speech in this release represents the Addis Ababa, Shewa, and Gondar dialect regions of Ethiopia. The gender distribution among speakers is approximately equal; speakers' ages range from 16 years to 60 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.

IARPA Babel Amharic Language Pack IARPA-babel307b-v1.0b 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 $25.

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

In this newsletter: (December 2019)
LDC Membership Discounts for MY2020 Still Available
Spring 2020 Data Scholarship Program – deadline approaching
Introducing LanguageArc: A Citizen Linguist Portal

New Publications:
Magic Data Chinese Mandarin Conversational Speech
BOLT Egyptian Arabic-English Word Alignment -- SMS/Chat Training
TAC KBP Entity Discovery and Linking - Comprehensive Evaluation Data 2016-2017

LDC Membership Discounts for MY2020 Still Available
Join LDC while membership savings are still available. Now through March 2, 2020, current MY2019 members who renew their LDC membership receive a 10% discount off the membership fee. New or returning member organizations receive a 5% discount through March 2. Membership remains the most economical way to access LDC releases. Visit Join LDC for details on membership options and benefits.

Spring 2020 Data Scholarship Program – deadline approaching
Students can apply for the Spring 2020 Data Scholarship Program now through January 15, 2020. The LDC Data Scholarship program provides students with no-cost access to LDC data. For more information on application requirements and program rules, please visit LDC Data Scholarships. 

Introducing LanguageArc: A Citizen Linguist Portal
LanguageARC is a citizen science website for languages developed with a grant from the National Science Foundation (no. 170377). Contributors to this online community – “citizen linguists” – participate in a variety of tasks and activities that support linguistic research, such as identifying accents from audio clips, recording “tongue twisters,” and translating English sentences into other languages. Data collected from LanguageArc will be made freely available to the research community. New collection and annotation projects will be added on an ongoing basis, and researchers will soon be able to create their own LanugageArc projects with an easy-to-use Project Builder Toolkit.  All are encouraged to explore the site and participate in the community. Comments, questions and suggestions are welcome via the site’s Contact page.

New publications:

(1) Magic Data Chinese Mandarin Conversational Speech was developed by Beijing Magic Data Technology Co., Ltd. and consists of approximately 10 hours of Mandarin conversational speech from 60 speakers. Each conversation was recorded on multiple devices and is presented in multiple forms, resulting in a total of approximately 60 hours of audio with corresponding transcripts.

All participants were native speakers of Mandarin in Mainland China from accent regions across the country. Speakers were paired for conversations on a range of topics, including travel, fitness, games, sports, and pets. Metadata such as topic, collection date, mobile device, and speaker demographic information is available in the documentation accompanying this release.

Magic Data Chinese Mandarin Conversational Speech 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 $750.

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(2) BOLT Egyptian Arabic-English Word Alignment -- SMS/Chat Training was developed by LDC and consists of 349,414 words of Egyptian Arabic and English parallel text enhanced with linguistic tags to indicate word relations.

This release contains Egyptian Arabic source text message and chat conversations collected using two methods: new collection via LDC's collection platform, and donation of SMS or chat archives from BOLT collection participants. The source data is released as BOLT Egyptian Arabic SMS/Chat and Transliteration (LDC2017T07).

The BOLT word alignment task was built on treebank annotation. Egyptian Arabic source tree tokens were automatically extracted from tree files in LDC’s BOLT Egyptian Arabic Treebank, which had been tagged for part-of-speech and syntactically annotated. That data was then aligned and annotated for the word alignment task.

BOLT Egyptian Arabic-English Word Alignment -- SMS/Chat Training 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 $1750.

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(3) TAC KBP Entity Discovery and Linking - Comprehensive Evaluation Data 2016-2017 was developed by LDC and contains training and evaluation data produced in support of the TAC KBP Entity Discovery and Linking (EDL) tasks in 2016 and 2017. This corpus includes queries, knowledge base (KB) links, equivalence class clusters for NIL entities, and entity type information for each of the queries. The EDL reference KB, to which EDL data are linked, is available separately in TAC KBP Entity Discovery and Linking - Comprehensive Training and Evaluation Data 2014-2015 (LDC2019T02).

The goal of the EDL track is to conduct end-to-end entity extraction, linking and clustering. For producing gold standard data, given a document collection, annotators (1) extract (identify and classify) entity mentions (queries), link them to nodes in a reference KB and (2) perform cross-document co-reference on within-document entity clusters that cannot be linked to the KB.

Source data for the annotations consists of Chinese, English and Spanish newswire and discussion forum text collected by LDC and is available in TAC KBP Evaluation Source Corpora 2016-2017 (LDC2019T12).

TAC KBP Entity Discovery and Linking - Comprehensive Evaluation Data 2016-2017 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 $1500.

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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