ELRA - Language Resources Catalogue - Update
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ELRA is happy to announce that 4 new Written Corpora are now available in its catalogue.

 ELRA-W0059 LT Corpus The LT Corpus is composed of 70 fiction texts from Portuguese renowned authors. The corpus contains 1,781,083 tokens. The texts date from before 1940. The corpus is delivered in one file, in two different formats. The txt version has one sentence per line, an identification number for each text and no further annotation. The cqpweb file is one token per line, followed by pos tag and lemma, and is annotated for NP chunks. For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1178
ELRA-W0060 PTPARL Corpus The PTPARL Corpus contains 1,076 texts consisting of adapted transcriptions of the Portuguese Parliament sessions. The corpus contains 1,000,441 tokens. The corpus is delivered in one file, in two different formats. The txt version has one sentence per line, an identification number for each text and no further annotation. The cqpweb file is one token per line, followed by pos tag and lemma, and is annotated for NP chunks.For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1179
ELRA-W0061 CINTIL-DependencyBank The CINTIL-DependencyBank (Silva and Branco, 2012) is a corpus of sentences annotated with their syntactic dependency graphs and grammatical function tags composed of 10,039 sentences and 110,166 tokens taken from different sources and domains: news (8,861 sentences; 101,430 tokens), novels (399 sentences; 3,082 tokens). In addition, there are 779 sentences (5,654 tokens) that are used for regression testing of the computational grammar that supported the annotation of the corpus. For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1180
ELRA-W0062 CINTIL-DeepBank The CINTIL-DeepBank (Branco et al., 2010) is a corpus of sentences annotated with their full-fledged deep grammatical representations, composed of 10,039 sentences and 110,166 tokens taken from different sources and domains: news (8,861 sentences; 101,430 tokens), and novels (399 sentences; 3,082 tokens). In addition, there are 779 sentences (5,654 tokens) used for regression testing of the computational grammar that supported the annotation of the corpus. For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1181
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 2013 LDC Data Scholarship Program - deadline approaching!  -

-  Two New LDC Podcasts for your Listening Pleasure  -

-  Penn Discourse Treebank Version 2.0 Update  -
-  LDC to close for Winter Break  -

New publications:

-  GALE Chinese-English Word Alignment and Tagging Training Part 3 -- Web  -

-  Russian-English Computer Security Parallel Text  -

 Spring 2013 LDC Data Scholarship Program - deadline approaching!

The deadline for the Spring 2013 LDC Data Scholarship Program is one month away!   Student applications are being accepted now through January 15, 2013, 11:59PM EST.  The LDC Data Scholarship program provides university students with access to LDC data at no cost.  This program is open to students pursuing both undergraduate and graduate studies in an accredited college or university. LDC Data Scholarships are not restricted to any particular field of study; however, students must demonstrate a well-developed research agenda and a bona fide inability to pay. 
Students will need to complete an application which consists of a data use proposal and letter of support from their adviser.  For further information on application materials and program rules, please visit the LDC Data Scholarship page. 

Students can email their applications to the LDC Data Scholarship program. Decisions will be sent by email from the same address.

Two New LDC Podcasts for your Listening Pleasure

Two new podcasts are available on a theLDC blog continuing the  20^th Anniversary series. The first features Natalia Bragilevskaya, LDC’s Business Administrator, Membership Coordinator Ilya Ahtaridis and Marian Reed, Marketing Coordinator. They recall the early days of LDC and describe the growth of sponsored projects work and LDC’s interactions with its membership.

Click here for Natalia, Ilya and Marian’s podcast.

The third podcast in the series introduces the community to two  LDC’ researchers Yiwola Awoyale and Moussa Bamba, whose work focuses on West African languages.

Yiwola has been teaching Linguistics, Yoruba language studies and various aspects of African linguistics since 1975. At LDC, he developed the Global Yoruba Lexical Database, a set of related dictionaries based on Yoruba and its diaspora. Moussa’s work in the Manding languages of the Niger-Congo family has resulted in the release of the Mawukakan Lexicon, to be followed by similar resources for Maninkakan, Bambara, and Jula.

In their podcast, Yiwola and Moussa discuss how they came  to LDC, their current research and how it benefits multiple communities.Click here for Yiwola and Moussa’s podcast.

Other podcasts will be published via the LDC blog, so stay tuned to that space.

Penn Discourse Treebank Version 2.0 Update

 The developers of the Penn Discourse Treebank Version 2.0 LDC2008T05 (PDTB) have updated this release to add metadata to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) news stories in the corpus. The goal is to aid understanding PDTB files as texts and to support distinguishing texts from different genres within the WSJ. The metadata includes the following fields:

• DD: the date the article appeared in the WSJ

• AN: unique identifier for the article

• HL: the column name (for regular features such as Who's News, Marketing & Media, Technology), its headline and by-line

• SO: the source of the article

• IN: manually-assigned codes or keywords for the article

• CO: manually-assigned codes for companies or other organizations

• DATELINE: normally the location where the article was filed, but sometimes has very unexpected contents

• GV: Branch of Government or Government Agency mentioned in the article

• SBREAKS: the byte position of section breaks present in the file

• ARTICLEBREAK: separates files that contain more than one article

All new downloads of PDTB will contain the complete updated corpus.  Current PDTB licensees can re-download the file to obtain the updated data.

LDC to close for Winter Break

LDC will be closed from Monday, December 24, 2012 through Tuesday, January 1, 2013 in accordance with the University of Pennsylvania Winter Break Policy.  Our offices will reopen on Wednesday, January 2, 2013.  Requests received for membership renewals and corpora during the Winter Break will be processed at that time.
Best wishes for a happy and safe holiday season!

New publications

(1) GALE Chinese-English Word Alignment and Tagging Training Part 3 -- Webwas developed by LDC and contains 154,541 tokens of word aligned Chinese and English parallel text enriched with linguistic tags. This material was used as training data in the DARPA GALE(Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) program.

Some approaches to statistical machine translation include the incorporation of linguistic knowledge in word aligned text as a means to improve automatic word alignment and machine translation quality. This is accomplished with two annotation schemes: alignment and tagging. Alignment identifies minimum translation units and translation relations by using minimum-match and attachment annotation approaches. A set of word tags and alignment link tags are designed in the tagging scheme to describe these translation units and relations. Tagging adds contextual, syntactic and language-specific features to the alignment annotation.

GALE Chinese-English Word Alignment and Tagging Training Part 1 -- Newswire and Web (LDC2012T16) and GALE Chinese-English Word Alignment and Tagging Training Part 3 -- Web (LDC2012T20) are also available through LDC.
This release consists of Chinese source web data (newsgroup, weblog) collected by LDC in 2008 and 2009. The distribution by words, character tokens and segments appears below:

Note that all token counts are based on the Chinese data only. One token is equivalent to one character and one word is equivalent to 1.5 characters.

The Chinese word alignment tasks consisted of the following components:

• Identifying, aligning, and tagging 8 different types of links

• Identifying, attaching, and tagging local-level unmatched words

• Identifying and tagging sentence/discourse-level unmatched words

• Identifying and tagging all instances of Chinese 的(DE) except when they were a part of a semantic link.

GALE Chinese-English Word Alignment and Tagging Training Part 3 -- Web is distributed via web download.

2012 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this data 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$1750.

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(2) Russian-English Computer Security Parallel Textwas developed by The MITRE Corporation. It consists of parallel sentences from a set of computer security reports published in Russian and translated into English by translators with particular expertise in the technical area. Translators were instructed to err on the side of literal translation if required, but to maintain the technical writing style of the source and to make the resulting English as natural as possible. The translators followed specific guidelines for translation, and those are included in this distribution.

There are 6,276 lines of parallel Russian and English, with a total of 60,059 words of Russian and 76,437 words of English, presented in a separate UTF-8 plain text file for each language. The sentences were translated in sequential order and presented in a scrambled order, such that parallel sentences at identical line numbers are translations. For example, the 31st line of the English file is a translation of the 31st line of the Russian file. The original line sequence is not provided. 1,694 untranslated lines (such as code snippets) are included as a separate file.

Russian-English Computer Security Parallel Text is distributed via web download.

2012 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this data 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$1500.

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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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