In this newsletter:

Join LDC for Membership Year 2022
Spring 2022 Data Scholarship Application Deadline

New Publications:
BOLT Egyptian Arabic PropBank and Sense – Discussion Forum, SMS/Chat, and Conversational Telephone Speech
Second DIHARD Challenge Development – Eleven Sources
Second DIHARD Challenge Development - SEEDLingS

Join LDC for Membership Year 2022
Membership Year 2022 (MY2022) is open and discounts are available for those who keep their membership current and join early. Current MY2021 members who renew their LDC membership before March 1, 2022 will receive a 10% discount off the membership fee. New or returning organizations will receive a 5% discount when joining by March 1.

In addition to receiving new publications, current LDC members also enjoy the benefit of licensing older data from our Catalog of 900 holdings at reduced fees. Current-year for-profit members may use most data for commercial applications.

Plans for MY2022 publications are in progress. Among the expected releases are:

• 2017 NIST OpenSAT Pilot – SSSF: real world operational English speech data, transcripts and annotation files used in the speech activity detection, automatic speech recognition, and keyword search tasks of the 2017 OpenSAT Pilot evaluation
• AttImam: 2000 attribution relations applied to Arabic newswire text from Arabic Treebank: Part 1 v 4.1 LDC2010T13
• Samrómur Icelandic Speech: 145 hours of Icelandic prompted speech from 8000 speakers covering text from novels, news, plays, and location names
• MASRI Synthetic: 99 hours of synthesized Maltese speech from various genres with transcripts
• HAVIC MED Novel Tests: thousands of hours of event and background user-generated videos with annotation and metadata used for the 2015 Multimedia Event Detection task
• DIHARD Challenges: development and evaluation data from the second and third DIHARD evaluations, a set of shared tasks focusing on speech diarization for challenging data
• LORELEI: representative and incident language packs containing monolingual text, bi-text, translations, annotations, supplemental resources, and related tools (Kinyarwanda, Wolof)

It’s not too late to join LDC for MY2020 (through December 31, 2021) and MY2021 (through December 31, 2022). Data sets from those years include 2018 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set, Mixer 4 and 5 Speech, AMR Annotation Release 3.0, Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English, RATS Speaker Identification, BOLT Egyptian Arabic and Chinese resources (treebanks, propbanks, co-reference), Global TIMIT Mandarin Chinese, and MyST Children’s Conversational Speech.

For full descriptions of all LDC data sets, browse our Catalog.  

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

Spring 2022 Data Scholarship Application Deadline
Applications are now being accepted through January 15, 2022 for the Spring 2022 LDC Data Scholarship program which provides university students with no-cost access to LDC data. Consult the LDC Data Scholarship page for more information about program rules and submission requirements.

New publications:
(1) BOLT Egyptian Arabic PropBank and Sense – Discussion Forum, SMS/Chat, and Conversational Telephone Speech was developed by the University of Colorado Boulder - CLEAR (Computational Language and Education Research) for the DARPA BOLT program and consists of propbank annotation on Egyptian Arabic informal text and telephone speech.

Propbank annotation provides a layer of semantic annotation over treebank. In this release, it was applied to BOLT phrase structure treebank annotation and was carried out in two phases: (1) a frame file for each predicate was created, and (2) the predicate argument structure was annotated using the frame file as a reference.

BOLT Egyptian Arabic PropBank and Sense – Discussion Forum, SMS/Chat, and Conversational Telephone Speech is distributed via web download.

2021 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2021 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for $300.

*

(2) Second DIHARD Challenge Development - Eleven Sources was developed by LDC and contains approximately 22 hours of English and Chinese speech data along with corresponding annotations used in support of the Second DIHARD Challenge.

The DIHARD Challenges are a set of shared tasks on diarization focusing on 'hard' diarization; that is, speech diarization for challenging corpora where there was an expectation that existing state-of-the-art systems would fare poorly. As with the first challenge, the second development and evaluation sets were drawn from a diverse sampling of sources including monologues, map task dialogues, broadcast interviews, sociolinguistic interviews, meeting speech, speech in restaurants, clinical recordings, extended child language acquisition recordings, and amateur web videos.

Second DIHARD Challenge Development – Eleven Sources is distributed via web download.

2021 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2021 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for $300.

*

(3) Second DIHARD Challenge Development - SEEDLingS was developed by Duke University and LDC and contains approximately two hours of English child language recordings along with corresponding annotations used in support of the Second DIHARD Challenge. The DIHARD Challenges are a set of shared tasks on diarization focusing on 'hard' diarization; that is, speech diarization for challenging corpora where there was an expectation that existing state-of-the-art systems would fare poorly.

Source data is from the SEEDLingS (The Study of Environmental Effects on Developing Linguistic Skills) corpus, designed to investigate how infants' early linguistic and environmental input plays a role in their learning. Recordings were generated in the home environment of infants in the Rochester, New York area. A subset of that data was annotated by LDC for use in the first and second DIHARD Challenges.

The data in this release consists of files provided in the Second DIHARD Challenge as well as subsequently updated annotated files not provided to second challenge participants.

Second DIHARD Challenge Development – SEEDLingS is distributed via web download.

2021 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. 2021 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for $50.

Membership Coordinator

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