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ELRA - Language Resources Catalogue - Update
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ELRA is happy to announce that 1 new Monolingual Lexicon, 3 new Speech Resources and 3 new Evaluation Packages are now available in its catalogue.
Moreover, updated versions of the ESTER Corpus, ESTER Evaluation Package and Bulgarian WordNet have also been released. 

1) New Language Resources:

ELRA-L0088 Arabic Morphological Dictionary
The Arabic Morphological Dictionary contains 7,912,551 entries, including 6,247,291 nouns, 1,537,499 verbs, 127,563 adjectives, 198 grammatical words. All files are provided as plain text in UTF8 character encoding, which represents about 154 Mb of data.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1163

ELRA-S0338 ESTER 2 Corpus
ESTER 2 Corpus, produced within the ESTER 2 evaluation campaign, consists of a manually transcribed radio broadcast news corpus amounting about 100 hours and quick transcriptions of African radios amounting about 6 hours. An annotation of named entities is provided within the development data (about 6 hours).
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?cPath=37_46&products_id=1167

ELRA-S0339 Acoustic database for Polish unit selection speech synthesis
This database contains parliamentary statements and newspaper reviews read by a semi-professional male speaker. It consists of a selection of 2150 sentences annotated and manually verified, including 100 rare phonemes in words. The total duration of the recordings is 3.45 hours. The database is phonetically annotated and manually corrected, which represents a lexicon of 11761 words with phonetic transcription.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?cPath=37_39&products_id=1164

ELRA-S0342 Acoustic database for Polish concatenative speech synthesis
This database consists of 1443 nonsense words including all the diphones for the Polish language. The database includes information such as: the name of the diphone, context of the diphone, phonetic transcription in SAMPA, identifier of the wave file where it is placed, and three numbers: the beginning, the middle and the end of the diphone.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?cPath=37_39&products_id=1168

ELRA-E0035 DEFT'08 Evaluation Package
DEFT (DEfi Fouille de Texte – Text Mining Challenge) organizes evaluation campaigns in the field of text mining. The topic of DEFT 2008 edition is related to the classification of texts by topics and genres. DEFT’08 Evaluation Package enables to compare two corpora with different genres (a newspaper article corpus extracted from Le Monde newspaper and a corpus of encyclopaedic articles extracted from the internet free encyclopaedia, Wikipedia) on the basis of the same set of pre-defined categories.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1165

ELRA-E0039 CLEF QAST (2007-2009) – Evaluation Package
The CLEF QAST (2007-2009) contains the data used for the Question Answering on Speech Transcripts tracks of the CLEF campaigns carried out from 2007 to 2009. These tracks tested the performance of monolingual Question Answering systems on collections of audio transcriptions.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1162

ELRA-E0040 MEDAR Evaluation Package
The MEDAR Evaluation Package was produced within the project MEDAR (MEDiterranean ARabic language and speech technology), supported by the European Commission's ICT programme. It aims to enable the evaluation of SLT /MT (Machine Translation) systems for translation tasks applying to the English-to-Arabic direction.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?cPath=42_43&products_id=1166

2) Updated Language Resources:
 
ELRA-S0241 ESTER Corpus
This new release contains 100 hours of orthographically transcribed news broadcast (instead of 60 hours for the previous release).
The ESTER Corpus is a subset of the ESTER Evaluation Package (catalogue ref. ELRA-E0021), which was produced within the French national project ESTER (Evaluation of Broadcast News enriched transcription systems), as part of the Technolangue programme funded by the French Ministry of Research and New Technologies (MRNT). The ESTER project enabled to carry out a campaign for the evaluation of Broadcast News enriched transcription systems for French.
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=999

ELRA-E0021 ESTER Evaluation Package
This new release contains 100 hours of orthographically transcribed news broadcast (instead of 60 hours for the previous release).
The ESTER Evaluation Package was produced within the French national project ESTER (Evaluation of Broadcast News enriched transcription systems), as part of the Technolangue programme funded by the French Ministry of Research and New Technologies (MRNT). The ESTER project enabled to carry out a campaign for the evaluation of Broadcast News enriched transcription systems for French.
This package includes the material that was used for the ESTER evaluation campaign. It includes resources, protocols, scoring tools, results of the campaign, etc., that were used or produced during the campaign. The aim of these evaluation packages is to enable external players to evaluate their own system and compare their results with those obtained during the campaign itself.
The campaign is distributed over three actions: orthographic transcription, segmentation and information extraction (named entity tracking).
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=995

ELRA-M0041 Bulgarian WordNet
This new release contains 38209 synsets (instead of 23715 synsets for the previous release).
The Bulgarian WordNet is a network of lexical-semantic relations, an electronic thesaurus with a structure modelled on that of the Princeton WordNet and those constructed in the EuroWordNet and BalkaNet project. Bulgarian WordNet describes meaning of a lexical unit by placing it within a network of semantic relations, such as hypernyny, meronymy, antonymy etc. It contains 38209 synsets, 83493 literals, 89242 relations (including 58095 semantic relations, 4172 extralinguistic relations).
For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?cPath=42_45&products_id=802


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.htm

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In this newsletter:

-  2012 LDC Survey Responses and Benefit Winner  -

-  LDC at ICASSP 2012  -

New publications:

LDC2012T02
-  English Translation Treebank: An Nahar Newswire  -

LDC2012S04
 -  Malto Speech and Transcripts  -

2012 LDC Survey Responses and Benefit Winner

Thanks to all who participated in the 2012 LDC Survey. Your responses were thoughtful and informative. We’re now analyzing the results; stay tuned for an announcement on the survey findings.

In the meantime, please join us in congratulating Todor Ganchev from the University of Patras, Wire Communications Laboratory (WCL) for winning the survey participation benefit!  As a reminder, one $500 benefit was awarded to a blindly-selected participant whose response was received by February 7, 2012.

LDC at ICASSP 2012

LDC will be traveling across the globe to exhibit at its first IEEE-hosted event. The 37th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) will be held at the Kyoto International Conference Center in Kyoto, Japan, on March 25 - 30, 2012.

The ICASSP meeting is the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing and its applications, and LDC is looking forward to interacting with members of this community. Please look for LDC’s exhibition at Booth #14 in the Annex Hall. We hope to see you there!

New Publications

(1) English Translation Treebank: An Nahar Newswire was developed by LDC and consists of 599 distinct newswire stories from the Lebanese publication An Nahar translated from Arabic to English and annotated for part-of-speech and syntactic structure.

This corpus is part of an ongoing effort at LDC to produce parallel Arabic and English treebanks. The guidelines followed for both part-of-speech and syntactic annotation are Penn Treebank II style, with changes in the tokenization of hyphenated words, part-of-speech and tree changes necessitated by those tokenization changes and revisions to the syntactic annotation to comply with the updated annotation guidelines (including the 'Treebank-PropBank merge' or 'Treebank IIa' and 'treebank c' changes). The original Penn Treebank II guidelines, addenda describing changes to the guidelines and the tokenization specifications can be found on LDC's website.

The data consists of 461,489 tokens in 599 individual files. The news stories in this release were published in An Nahar in 2002.

The English sources files (translated from the Arabic) were automatically tokenized, part-of-speech tagged and parsed; the tokens, tags and parses were manually corrected. The quality control process consisted of a series of specific searches for over 100 types of potential inconsistency and parse or annotation error. Any errors found in those searches were manually corrected.

Annotations are in the following two formats:

• Penn Style Trees
• Bracketed tree files following the basic form (NODE (TAG token)). Each sentence is surrounded by a pair of empty parentheses.
• AG xml
• TreeEditor .xml stand-off annotation files. These files contain the POS and Treebank annotation and reference the source files by character offset. DTD files for the AG xml files were moved from their original location indicated in the readme to be more consistent with LDC publications.

English Translation Treebank: An Nahar Newswire 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 license this data for US$4500.

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(2) Malto Speech and Transcripts was developed by Masato Kobayashi, Associate Professor in Linguistics at the University of Tokyo (Japan), and Bablu Tirkey, research scholar at the Tribal and Regional Languages Department, Ranchi University (India). It contains approximately 8 hours of Malto speech data collected between 2005 and 2009 from 27 speakers (22 males, 5 females). Also included are accompanying transcripts, English translations and glosses for 6 hours of the collection. Speakers were asked to talk about themselves, their lives, rituals and folklore; elicitation interviews were then conducted. The goal of the work was to present the current state and dialectal variation of Malto.

Malto is a Dravidian language spoken in northeastern India (principally the states of Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal) and Bangladesh by people called the Pahariyas. Indian census data places the number of Malto speakers in a range of between 100,000-200,000 total speakers. Most Malto speakers live in the three northeastern districts of Jharkhand, i.e, Sahebganj, Godda and Pakur; the fieldwork that resulted in this corpus was conducted in those districts. Of the Pahariyas in that area, three subtribes, the Sawriya Pahariyas, the Mal Pahariyas and the Kumarbhag Pahariyas, primarily speak Malto.

The transcribed data accounts for 6 hours of the collection and contains 21 speakers (17 male, 4 female). The untranscribed data accounts for 2 hours of the collection and contains 10 speakers (9 male, 1 female). Four of the male speakers are present in both groups.

All audio is presented in .wav format. Each audio file name includes a subject number, village name, speaker name and the topic discussed. The transcripts and glossary are UTF-8 text files. Because of ambiguities that occur when writing Malto in Devenagari script, the transcripts were developed using Roman script with symbols adapted from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) but are not considered  phonetic transcripts.

Malto Speech and Transcripts is distributed on 1 DVD-ROM.

2012 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2012 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. The first 100 copies distributed to non-member organizations are available at no charge.   Shipping and handling fees apply.

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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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Appen ButlerHill 

A global leader in linguistic technology solutions

RECENT CATALOG ADDITIONS—MARCH 2012

1. Speech Databases

1.1 Telephony

2. Pronunciation Lexica

Appen Butler Hill has considerable experience in providing a variety of lexicon types. These include:

 Pronunciation Lexica providing phonemic representation, syllabification, and stress (primary and secondary as appropriate)

 Part-of-speech tagged Lexica providing grammatical and semantic labels

 Other reference text based materials including spelling/mis-spelling lists, spell-check dictionar-ies, mappings of colloquial language to standard forms, orthographic normalization lists.

Over a period of 15 years, Appen Butler Hill has generated a significant volume of licensable material for a wide range of languages. For holdings information in a given language or to discuss any customized development efforts, please contact: sales@appenbutlerhill.com

4. Other Language Resources

 Morphological Analyzers – Farsi/Persian & Urdu

 Arabic Thesaurus

 Language Analysis Documentation – multiple languages

For additional information on these resources, please contact: sales@appenbutlerhill.com

5. Customized Requests and Package Configurations

Appen Butler Hill is committed to providing a low risk, high quality, reliable solution and has worked in 130+ languages to-date supporting both large global corporations and Government organizations.

We would be glad to discuss to any customized requests or package configurations and prepare a cus-tomized proposal to meet your needs.

                                                         www.appenbutlerhill.com

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