In this newsletter:
30th Anniversary Highlight: Penn Treebank

New publications:
NUBUC
Samrómur Icelandic Speech 1.0

30th Anniversary Highlight: Penn Treebank
LDC’s Catalog features classic corpora responsible for critical advances in human language technology that continue to influence researchers. Among them are the Penn Treebank releases, Treebank-2 (LDC96T7) and Treebank-3 (LDC99T42).

The Penn Treebank project (1989-1996) produced seven million words tagged for part-of-speech, three million words of parsed text, over two million words annotated for predicate-argument structure and 1.6 million words of transcribed speech annotated for speech disfluencies (Taylor et al., 2003). Source material represents a diverse range of data, including Wall Street Journal (WSJ) articles, the Brown Corpus and Switchboard telephone conversations.

Penn Treebanks are used for a wide range of purposes, including the creation and training of parsers and taggers, work on machine translation and speech recognition, and research concerning joint syntactic and semantic role labeling. Their ongoing influence is evidenced by the popularity of Treebank-3 (LDC99T42), which continues to be one of LDC’s top ten most distributed corpora in the Catalog. In addition, the WSJ section has served as a model for treebanks across many languages (Nivre, 2008).

The Penn Treebank has inspired related annotation schemes, such as Proposition Bank, the Penn Discourse Treebank project, and word alignment annotation. In addition, LDC has developed revised English treebank guidelines resulting in the re-issue of the WSJ section (English News Text Treebank: Penn Treebank Revised (LDC2015T13)) and treebanked web text (e.g., English Web Treebank (LDC2012T13) and BOLT English Translation Treebank – Chinese Discussion Forum (LDC2020T09)).  

Penn Treebank corpora and its related releases are available for licensing to LDC members and nonmembers. For more information about licensing LDC data, visit Obtaining Data.

New publications:
(1)  NUBUC (NyU-BU contextually controlled stories Corpus) was developed by New York University, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics and Boston University. It contains approximately three hours of English read speech from eight stories focused on linguistic keywords that were created specifically for this corpus, along with transcripts, syntactic annotations, and corpus metadata.

Stories are centered on a protagonist and bear a similarity to a modern fairy tale. Each story consists of approximately 2,000 words organized around critical keywords matched along multiple linguistic dimensions. The story texts comprise a total of 1024 sentences and 16,472 words. Each story was read by two different voice actors, one male and one female, in a neutral American English accent.

Recordings are 11-12 minutes in duration, for a total of about 90 minutes of continuous speech per speaker.

NUBUC is distributed via web download.  

2022 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus. 2022 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data at no cost.

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(2) Samrómur Icelandic Speech 1.0 was developed by the Language and Voice Lab, Reykjavik University in cooperation with Almannarómur, Center for Language Technology. The corpus contains 145 hours of Icelandic prompted speech from 8,392 speakers representing 100,000 utterances.

Speech data was collected between October 2019 and May 2021 using the Samrómur website which displayed prompts to participants. The prompts were mainly from The Icelandic Gigaword Corpus, which includes text from novels, news, plays, and from a list of location names in Iceland. Additional prompts were taken from the Icelandic Web of Science and others were created by combining a name followed by a question or a demand. Prompts and speaker metadata are included in the corpus.

Samrómur Icelandic Speech 1.0 is distributed via web download.  

2022 Subscription Members will automatically receive copies of this corpus provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. 2022 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may license this data for $250.

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