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ELRA - Language Resources Catalogue - Update
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ELRA is happy to announce that 14 new Speech Resources are now available in its catalogue.

ELRA-S0324 Catalan-SpeechDat For the Fixed Telephone Network Database
This speech database contains the recordings of 2000 Catalan speakers who called from Fixed telephones and who are recorded over the fixed PSTN using and ISDN-BRI interface. Each speaker uttered around 50 read and spontaneous items. The speech database follows the specifications made within the SpeechDat (II) project. The database was validated by UVIGO. The Catalan-SpeechDat for the Fixed Telephone Network Database was funded by the Catalan Government.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?cPath=37_38&products_id=1146

ELRA-S0325 Catalan-SpeechDat for the Mobile Telephone Network Database
This speech database contains the recordings of 2000 Catalan speakers who called from GSM telephones and who are recorded over the fixed PSTN using and ISDN-BRI interface. Each speaker uttered around 50 read and spontaneous items. The speech database follows the specifications made within the SpeechDat (II) project. The database was validated by UVIGO. The Catalan-SpeechDat for the Mobile Telephone Network Database was funded by the Catalan Government.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?cPath=37_38&products_id=1147

ELRA-S0326 Catalan SpeechDat-Car database
The Catalan SpeechDat-Car database contains the in-car recordings of 300 speakers who uttered from around 120 read and spontaneous items. Each speaker recorded two sessions. Recordings have been made through 4 different channels, via in-car microphones (1 close-talk microphone, 3 far-talk microphones). The 300 Catalan speakers were selected from 5 different dialectal regions and are balanced in gender and age groups. The database was validated by UVIGO. The Catalan-SpeechDat-Car Database was funded by the Catalan Government.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?cPath=37_39&products_id=1148

ELRA-S0327 Catalan Speecon database
The Catalan Speecon database comprises the recordings of 550 adult Catalan speakers who uttered over 290 items (read and spontaneous). The data were recorded over 4 microphone channels in 4 recording environments (office, entertainment, car, public place). The speech database follows the specifications made within the UE funded Speecon project. The database was validated by UVIGO. The Catalan-Speecon Database was funded by the Catalan Government.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?cPath=37_39&products_id=1149

ELRA-S0328 Spanish EUROM.1
EUROM1 is a multilingual European speech database. It contains over 60 speakers per language who pronounced numbers, sentences, isolated words ... using close talking microphone in an anecoic room. Equivalent corpora for each of the European languages exist already, with the same number of speakers selected in the same way, and recorded in the same conditions with common file formats.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?cPath=37_39&products_id=1150

ELRA-S0329 Emotional speech synthesis database
This database contains the recordings of one male and one female Spanish professional speakers recorded in a noise-reduced room. It consists in recordings and annotations of read text material in neutral style plus six MPEG expressions, all in fast, slow, soft and loud speech styles. The text material is composed of 184 items including phonetically balanced sentences, digits and isolated words. The text material was the same for all the modes and styles, giving a total of 3h 59min recorded speech for the male speaker and 3h 53min for the female speaker. The Emotional speech synthesis database was created within the scope of the Interface EU funded project.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?cPath=37_39&products_id=1151

ELRA-S0330 FESTCAT Catalan TTS baseline male speech database
This database contains the recordings of one male Catalan professional speaker recorded in a noise-reduced room simultaneously through a close talk microphone, a mid distance microphone and a laryngograph signal. This database consists in the recordings and annotations of read text material of approximately 10 hours of speech for baseline applications (Text-to-Speech systems). The FESTCAT Catalan TTS Baseline Male Speech Database was created within the scope of the FESTCAT project, funded by the Catalan Government.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?cPath=37_39&products_id=1152

ELRA-S0331 FESTCAT Catalan TTS baseline female speech database
This database contains the recordings of one female Catalan professional speaker recorded in a noise-reduced room simultaneously through a close talk microphone, a mid distance microphone and a laryngograph signal. It consists in the recordings and annotations of read text material of approximately 10 hours of speech for baseline applications (Text-to-Speech systems). The FESTCAT Catalan TTS Baseline Female Speech Database was created within the scope of the FESTCAT project funded by the Catalan Government.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?cPath=37_39&products_id=1153

ELRA-S0332 FESTCAT Catalan TTS baseline speech database - 8 speakers
This database contains the recordings of four female and four male Catalan professional speakers recorded in a noise-reduced room simultaneously through a close talk microphone, a mid distance microphone and a laryngograph signal. It consists of the recordings and annotations of read text material of approximately 1 hour of speech per speaker for baseline applications (Text-to-Speech systems). The FESTCAT Catalan TTS baseline speech database - 8 speakers was created within the scope of the FESTCAT project funded by the Catalan Government.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?cPath=37_39&products_id=1154

ELRA-S0333 Spanish Festival HTS models - male speech
This database contains the Festival HTS models trained with 10h of speech from the TC-STAR Spanish Baseline Male Speech Database (ELRA-S0310).
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?cPath=37_39&products_id=1155

ELRA-S0334 Spanish Festival HTS models - female speech
This database contains the Festival HTS models trained with 10h of speech from the TC-STAR Spanish Baseline Female Speech Database (ELRA-S0309).
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?cPath=37_39&products_id=1156

ELRA-S0335 Bilingual (Spanish-English) Speech synthesis HTS models
This database contains Bilingual (English and Spanish) Festival HTS models. Models were trained with 9h of speech from 2 female bilingual speakers and 2 male bilingual speakers. Each speaker recorded 2h 15 min per language. The speech data can be found in the TC-STAR Bilingual Voice-Conversion Spanish Speech Database (ELRA-S0311) and in the TC-STAR Bilingual Expressive Spanish Speech Database (ELRA-S0313).
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?cPath=37_39&products_id=1157

ELRA-S0336 Spanish Festival voice male
This database contains the recordings of one male Spanish speaker recorded in a noise-reduced room simultaneously through a close talk microphone, a mid distance microphone and a laryngograph signal. This comprises read text material of approximately 10 hours of speech for baseline applications (Text-to-Speech systems). The database includes Festival-compatible annotations. The recordings can be also found under TC-STAR Spanish Baseline Male Speech Database (ELRA-S0310).
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?cPath=37_39&products_id=1158

ELRA-S0337 Spanish Festival voice female
This database contains the recordings of one female Spanish speaker recorded in a noise-reduced room simultaneously through a close talk microphone, a mid distance microphone and a laryngograph signal, of read text material of approximately 10 hours of speech for baseline applications (Text-to-Speech systems). The database includes Festival-compatible annotations. The recordings can be also found under TC-STAR Spanish Baseline Female Speech Database (ELRA-S0309).
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?cPath=37_39&products_id=1159
 

For more information on the catalogue, please contact Valérie Mapelli mailto:mapelli@elda.org

Visit our On-line Catalogue: http://catalog.elra.info
Visit the Universal Catalogue: http://universal.elra.info
Archives of ELRA Language Resources Catalogue Updates: http://www.elra.info/LRs-Announcements.html

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In this newsletter:

-   Spring 2012 LDC Data Scholarship Recipients!  -

-  Membership Fee Savings and Publications Pipeline for MY2012  -

New publications:

LDC2012S03
-   Digital Archive of Southern Speech (DASS)  -

LDC2012T01
-   ModeS TimeBank 1.0  -

Spring 2012 LDC Data Scholarship Recipients!

LDC is pleased to announce the student recipients of the Spring 2012 LDC Data Scholarship program!  This program provides university students with access to LDC data at no-cost. Students were asked to complete an application which consisted of a proposal describing their intended use of the data, as well as a letter of support from their thesis adviser. We received many solid applications and have chosen six proposals to support.   The following students will receive no-cost copies of LDC data:

Zainab Ali Khalaf  – University of Science, Malaysia (Malaysia), graduate student, Computer Science. Zainab has been awarded a copy of 1996 English Broadcast News Transcripts (HUB4) (LDC97T22) for her work in spoken document retrieval. 

Daniel Jettka – Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), graduate student, Centre for Language & Communication Studies.  Daniel has been awarded  copies of Penn Discourse Treebank Version 2.0 (LDC2008T05) and RST Discourse Treebank (LDC2002T07) for his work in anaphora resolution.

Olga Nickolaevna Ladoshko - National Technical University of Ukraine “KPI” (Ukraine), graduate student, Acoustics and Acoustoelectronics. Olga has been awarded copies of  NTIMT (LDC93S2) and STC-TIMIT 1.0 (LDC2008S03) for her research in automatic speech recognition for Ukrainian.

Ming Yang, Xiaoxiao Ma, and Jiajia Huang – Wuhan University (China), graduate students, Computer Science.  Ming, Xiaoxiao, and Jiajia have been awarded  copies of ACE Time Normalization (TERN) 2004 English Training Data v 1.0 (LDC2005T07) and GALE Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast News Parallel Text – Part 1 (LDC2007T23) for their work in summarization and data mining.

Daria Vazhenina – University of Aizu (Japan), graduate student, Human Interface Lab.  Daria has been awarded a copy of 2005 Spring NIST Rich Transcription (RT-05S) Evaluation Set (LDC2011S06) for her work in speaker diarization.

Tanina Zappone - University of Rome “La Sapienza” (Italy), graduate student, Oriental Studies.  Tanina has been awarded a copy of Chinese Treebank 7.0 (LDC2010T07) for her work in China’s political communications.

Please join us in congratulating our student recipients!   The next LDC Data Scholarship program is scheduled for the Fall 2012 semester.

Membership Fee Savings and Publications Pipeline for MY2012

Time is quickly running out to save on membership fees for MY2012! Any organization which joins or renews membership for 2012 through Thursday, March 1, 2012, is entitled to a 5% discount on membership fees.  Organizations which held membership for MY2011 can receive a 10% discount on fees provided they renew prior to March 1, 2012.

Many publications for MY2012 are still in development. The planned publications for the upcoming months include:

ARRAU (Anaphor Resolution and Underspecification) ~ data annotated for anaphoric relations, with information about agreement and explicit representation of multiple antecedents for ambiguous anaphoric expressions and discourse antecedents for expressions which refer to abstract entities such as events, actions and plans. The corpus contains texts from various genres: task-oriented dialogues from the TRAINS project, narratives from the English Pear Stories , and newspaper articles from the Wall Street Journal portion of the Penn Treebank.

MALACH English ~ over 300 hours of English audio recordings of interviews conducted under the auspices of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education and associated transcripts produced as part of the Multilingual Access to Large Spoken ArCHives (MALACH) project. 

Malto Speech and Transcripts ~ speech files of Malto narratives recorded by Masato Kobayashi and Bablu Tirkey with associated transcripts. Malto is a Dravidian language spoken in northeastern India and Bangladesh.

NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program – Broadcast News ~ English broadcast news video annotated for the VACE (Video Analysis and Content Extraction) 2005 face, text and text word detection and tracking tasks.

OntoNotes 5.0 ~ multiple genres of English, Chinese, and Arabic text annotated for syntax, predicate argument structure and shallow semantics.

2012 Subscription Members are automatically sent all MY2012 data as it is released.  2012 Standard Members are entitled to request 16 corpora for free from MY2012.   Non-members may license most data for research use.

New publications

(1) Digital Archive of Southern Speech (DASS) was developed by the University of Georgia. It is a subset of the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS), which is in turn part of the Linguist Atlas Project (LAP). DASS contains approximately 370 hours of English speech data from 30 female speakers and 34 male speakers in .wav format and in .mp3 format, along with associated metadata about the speakers and the recordings and maps in .jpeg format relating to the recording locations.

LAP consists of a set of survey research projects about the words and pronunciation of everyday American English, the largest project of its kind in the United States. Interviews with thousands of native speakers across the country have been carried out since 1929. LAGS surveyed the everyday speech of Georgia, Tennessee, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas in a series of 914 audio-taped interviews conducted from 1968-1983. Interviews average approximately six hours in length; the systematic LAGS tape archive amounts to 5500 hours of sound recordings. DASS is a collection of 64 interviews from LAGS selected to cover a range of speech across the region and to represent multiple education levels and ethnic backgrounds.

Also included in this release is a version of the LICHEN software developed at the University of Oulu, Finland. LICHEN allows users to browse and search through the audio data in a more advanced fashion using a graphical interface.

Digital Archive of Southern Speech (DASS) is distributed on one hard disc drive.

2012 Subscription Not-for-Profit/US Government Members will automatically receive one copy of this data.  2012 For-Profit Members will receive a copy provided that they have submitted a completed copy of the User License Agreement for Digital Archive of Southern Speech (LDC2012S03).  2012 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for US$250.

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(2) ModeS TimeBank 1.0 was developed by researchers at Technical University of Madrid and Barcelona Media and is a corpus of Modern Spanish (17th and 18th centuries) annotated with temporal and event information according to TimeML mark-up and annotated with spatial information following the SpatialML scheme.

TimeML (Pustejovsky et al., 2005) is a specification language for annotating eventualities and time expressions in natural language as well as the temporal relations among them, thus facilitating the task of extraction, representation and exchange of temporal information. SpatialML (Mani et al., 2008) is a specification language for annotating and normalizing spatial expressions by means of geographic coordinates.

ModeS TimeBank 1.0 contains 102 documents reporting a sea-crossing cruise by a ship called La Princesa, which took place from December 1768 to April 1769. There exist copious logbooks from that period that not only provide information about shipping routes, but also contain valuable data concerning information flows, commercial agents and social networks.

All text is encoded in UTF-8. The data in ModeS TimeBank 1.0 has been tokenized, POS-tagged, and annotated with space, time and event information according to the TimeML and SpatialML specification schemes.

ModeS TimeBank 1.0 is distributed via web download. 

2012 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus on disc.  2012 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Non-members may request this data by completing a copy of the LDC User Agreement for Non-Members.  The agreement can be faxed +1 215 573 2175 or scanned and emailed to this address.  This data is available at no charge.

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Speechocean - Language Resource Catalogue - New Released (01- 2012)

Speechocean, as a global provider of language resources and data services, has more than 200 large-scale databases available in 80+ languages and accents covering the fields of Text to Speech, Automatic Speech Recognition, Text, Machine Translation, Web Search, Videos, Images etc.

Speechocean is glad to announce that more Speech Resources has been released:

Chinese and English Mixing Speech Synthesis Database (Female)

The Chinese Mandarin TTS Speech Corpus contains the read speech of a native Chinese Female professional broadcaster recorded in a studio with high SNR (>35dB) over two channels (AKG C4000B microphone and Electroglottography (EGG) sensor). 
The Corpus includes the following categories:
1.    Basic Mandarin sub-corpus: including 5,000 utterances which were carefully designed considering all kinds of linguistic phenomena. All sentences were declarative and extracted from News channels of People's Daily, China Daily, etc. The prompts with negative words were carefully excluded. ONLY suitable length sentences were accepted (7~20 words, in average 14 words). This sub-corpus can be used for R&D of HMM-based TTS, Limit domain TTS and Small-scale concatenative TTS;
2.    Complementary Mandarin sub-corpus: including 10,000 utterances which were carefully designed considering all kinds of linguistic phenomena. All sentences were declarative and extracted from News channels of People's Daily, China Daily, etc. The prompts with negative words are carefully excluded. ONLY suitable length sentences were accepted (7~20 words, average 14 words). This sub-corpus is a complementary corpus for Basic Mandarin sub-corpus and can be used for R&D of Large-scale concatenative TTS;
3.    Mandarin Neutral sub-corpus: including 380 Chinese bi-syllable words which embedded in carrier sentences;
4.    Mandarin ERHUA sub-corpus: including 290 Chinese Erhua syllables which embedded in carrier sentences;
5.    Mandarin Digit-String sub-corpus: including 1250 utterances with 3-digit length which considered the different pronunciation of 1, i.e. “yi1” and “yao1”.
6.    Mandarin Question sub-corpus: including 300 question sentences with common used question mark, for example “吗”, “么”, “呢”, and etc.;
7.    Mandarin exclamatory sub-corpus: including 200 exclamatory sentences with common used exclamatory mark, for example “呀”, “啊”, “吧”, “啦”, and etc.;
8.    Chinese English sentence sub-corpus: including 1,000 sentences which were carefully designed considering bi-phone coverage. All sentences were extracted from News channels of Voice of America (VOA), and etc. The prompts with negative words are carefully excluded. ONLY suitable length sentences were accepted (7~20 words, in average 12 words) and phonetically annotated with SAMPA. This sub-corpus can be used for R&D of HMM-based TTS, Limit domain TTS and Small-scale concatenative TTS;
9.    Chinese English words sub-corpus: including about 6,000 commonly used English words which embedded in carrier sentence;
10.    Chinese English Abbreviation sub-corpus: including about 200 utterances which considered not only the alphabet coverage, but also the combination of character and digit, such as “MP4”;
11.    Chinese English Letter sub-corpus: including 26 carrier utterances with each letter embedded in the Beginning, Middle and End;
12.    Chinese Greek Letter sub-corpus: including 24 carrier utterances with each letter embedded in the Beginning, Middle and End.

All speech data are segmented and labeled on phone level. Pronunciation lexicon and pitch extract from EEG can also be provided based on demands.

France French Speech Recognition Corpus (desktop) – 50 speakers

This France French desktop speech recognition database was collected by SpeechOcean in France. This database is one of our databases of Speech Data ----Desktop Project (SDD) which contains the database collections for 30 languages presently. 

It contains the voices of 50 different native speakers who were balanced distributed by age (mainly 16 – 30, 31 – 45, 46 – 60), gender (28 males, 22 females) and regional accents. The script was specially designed to provide material for both training and testing of many classes of speech recognition applications. Each speaker recorded 500 utterances in a quiet office environment through two professional microphones. Each utterance is stored as 44.1K 16Bit uncompressed PCM format and accompanied by an ASCII SAM label file which contains the relevant descriptive information.

A pronunciation lexicon with a phonemic transcription in SAMPA is also included.

UK English Speech Recognition Corpus (desktop) – 50 speakers

This UK English desktop speech recognition database was collected by SpeechOcean in England. This database is one of our databases of Speech Data ----Desktop Project (SDD) which contains the database collections for 30 languages presently. 

It contains the voices of 50 different native speakers who were balanced distributed by age (mainly 16 – 30, 31 – 45, 46 – 60), gender (28 males, 22 females) and regional accents. The script was specially designed to provide material for both training and testing of many classes of speech recognition applications. Each speaker recorded 500 utterances in a quiet office environment through two professional microphones. Each utterance is stored as 44.1K 16Bit uncompressed PCM format and accompanied by an ASCII SAM label file which contains the relevant descriptive information.

A pronunciation lexicon with a phonemic transcription in SAMPA is also included.

US English Speech Recognition Corpus (desktop) – 50 speakers

This US English desktop speech recognition database was collected by SpeechOcean in America. This database is one of our databases of Speech Data ----Desktop Project (SDD) which contains the database collections for 30 languages presently. 

It contains the voices of 50 different native speakers who were balanced distributed by age (mainly 16 – 30, 31 – 45, 46 – 60), gender (25 males, 25 females) and regional accents. The script was specially designed to provide material for both training and testing of many classes of speech recognition applications. Each speaker recorded 500 utterances in a quiet office environment through two professional microphones. Each utterance is stored as 44.1K 16Bit uncompressed PCM format and accompanied by an ASCII SAM label file which contains the relevant descriptive information.

A pronunciation lexicon with a phonemic transcription in SAMPA is also included.

Italian Speech Recognition Corpus (desktop) – 50 speakers

This Italian desktop speech recognition database was collected by SpeechOcean in Italy. This database is one of our databases of Speech Data ----Desktop Project (SDD) which contains the database collections for 30 languages presently. 

It contains the voices of 50 different native speakers who were balanced distributed by age (mainly 16 – 30, 31 – 45, 46 – 60), gender (23 males, 27 females) and regional accents. The script was specially designed to provide material for both training and testing of many classes of speech recognition applications. Each speaker recorded 500 utterances in a quiet office environment through two professional microphones. Each utterance is stored as 44.1K 16Bit uncompressed PCM format and accompanied by an ASCII SAM label file which contains the relevant descriptive information.

A pronunciation lexicon with a phonemic transcription in SAMPA is also included.

For more information about our Database and Services please visit our website www.Speechocen.com or visit our on-line Catalogue at http://www.speechocean.com/en-Product-Catalogue/Index.html

If you have any inquiry regarding our databases and service please feel free to contact us:

Xianfeng Cheng mailto: Chengxianfeng@speechocean.com

Marta Gherardi mailto: Marta@speechocean.com

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ELDA is launching a special distribution campaign offering very favorable conditions for the language resources acquisition,
including discounts on public prices, from the ELRA Catalogue of Language Resources (see http://catalog.elra.info).

This offer will be open until the end of December 2011.
 
For more information on this offer, please contact Valérie Mapelli (mapelli@elda.org)

Visit our On-line Catalogue: http://catalog.elra.info
Visit the Universal Catalogue: http://universal.elra.info
Archives of ELRA Language Resources Catalogue Updates: http://www.elra.info/LRs-Announcements.html

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