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    ELRA - Language Resources Catalogue - Update  May 2013
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    We are happy to announce that 10 new Pronunciation Dictionaries and     1 new Evaluation Package are now available in our catalogue. 
   
    The GlobalPhone Pronunciation Dictionaries:     GlobalPhone is a multilingual speech and text database collected at     Karlsruhe University, Germany. The GlobalPhone pronunciation     dictionaries contain the pronunciations of all word forms found in     the transcription data of the GlobalPhone speech & text     database. The pronunciation dictionaries are currently available in     10 languages: Arabic (29230 entries/27059 words), Bulgarian (20193     entries), Czech (33049 entries/32942 words), French (36837     entries/20710 words), German (48979 entries/46035 words), Hausa     (42662 entries/42079 words), Japanese (18094 entries), Polish (36484     entries), Portuguese (Brazilian) (54146 entries/54130 words) and     Swedish (about 25000 entries). Other 8 languages will also be     released: Chinese-Mandarin, Croatian, Korean, Russian, Spanish     (Latin American), Thai, Turkish, and Vietnamese.
   
    Special prices are offered for a combined purchase of several     GlobalPhone languages.
   
    Available GlobalPhone Pronuncation Dictionaries are listed below     (click on the links for further details):
    ELRA-S0340 GlobalPhone French Pronunciation Dictionary
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1197
    ELRA-S0341 GlobalPhone German Pronunciation Dictionary
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1198
    ELRA-S0348 GlobalPhone Japanese Pronunciation Dictionary
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1199
    ELRA-S0350 GlobalPhone Arabic Pronunciation Dictionary
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1200
    ELRA-S0351 GlobalPhone Bulgarian Pronunciation Dictionary
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1201
    ELRA-S0352 GlobalPhone Czech Pronunciation Dictionary
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1202
    ELRA-S0353 GlobalPhone Hausa Pronunciation Dictionary
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1203
    ELRA-S0354 GlobalPhone Polish Pronunciation Dictionary
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1204
    ELRA-S0355 GlobalPhone Portuguese (Brazilian) Pronunciation       Dictionary
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1205
    ELRA-S0356 GlobalPhone Swedish Pronunciation Dictionary
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1206
    ______________________
    ELRA-E0041 CHIL 2007+ Evaluation Package
    The CHIL Seminars are scientific presentations given by students,     faculty members or invited speakers in the field of multimodal     interfaces and speech processing. The language is European English     spoken by non native speakers. The recordings comprise the     following: videos of the speaker and the audience from 4 fixed     cameras, frontal close ups of the speaker, close talking and     far-field microphone data of the speaker’s voice and background     sounds.
    The CHIL 2007+ Evaluation Package includes: 1) CHIL 2007 Evaluation     Package (see ELRA-E0033) and 2) additional annotations which have     been created within the scope of the Metanet4u Project (ICT PSP No     270893), sponsored by the European Commission.
    For more information, see: http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1196
   
   
    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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ELRA releases free Language Resources
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Anticipating users’ expectations, ELRA has decided to offer a large number of resources for free for Academic research use. Such an offer consists of several sets of speech, text and multimodal resources that are regularly released, for free, as soon as legal aspects are cleared. A first set was released in May 2012 at the occasion of LREC 2012. A second set is now being released.

Whenever this is permitted by our licences, please feel free to use these resources for deriving new resources and depositing them with the ELRA catalogue for community re-use.

Over the last decade, ELRA has compiled a large list of resources into its Catalogue of LRs. ELRA has negotiated distribution rights with the LR owners and made such resources available under fair conditions and within a clear legal framework. Following this initiative, ELRA has also worked on LR discovery and identification with a dedicated team which investigated and listed existing and valuable resources in its 'Universal Catalogue', a list of resources that could be negotiated on a case-by-case basis. At LREC 2010, ELRA introduced the LRE Map, an inventory of LRs, whether developed or used, that were described in LREC papers. This huge inventory listed by the authors themselves constitutes the first 'community-built' catalogue of existing or emerging resources, constantly enriched and updated at major conferences.

Considering the latest trends on easing the sharing of LRs, from both legal and commercial points of view, ELRA is taking a major role in META-SHARE, a large European open infrastructure for sharing LRs. This infrastructure will allow LR owners, providers and distributors to distribute their LRs through an additional and cost-effective channel.

To obtain the available sets of LRs, please visit the web page below and follow the instructions given online:
http://www.elra.info/Free-LRs,26.html

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In this newsletter:
      

-  LDC
          at ICASSP 2013  -
     

-  Early
          renewing members save on fees  -
     

-  Commercial
          use and LDC data  -
           
      New publications
     

-  GALE
          Arabic-English Parallel Aligned Treebank -- Newswire          -
     

-  MADCAT
          Phase 2 Training Set  -

LDC at ICASSP 2013

LDC will be at ICASSP 2013, the world’s       largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on       signal processing and its applications. The event will be held       over May 26-31 and we look forward to interacting with members of       this community at our exhibit table and during our poster and       paper presentations:

     

Tuesday, May 28, 15:30 - 17:30, Poster Area D        

   

     

ARTICULATORY TRAJECTORIES FOR           LARGE-VOCABULARY SPEECH RECOGNITION

   

     

Authors: Vikramjit Mitra, Wen Wang, Andreas         Stolcke, Hosung Nam, Colleen Richey, Jiahong Yuan (LDC),         Mark Liberman (LDC)

   

     

Tuesday, May 28, 16:30 - 16:50, Room 2011

   

     

SCALE-SPACE EXPANSION OF           ACOUSTIC FEATURES IMPROVES SPEECH EVENT DETECTION

   

     

Authors: Neville Ryant, Jiahong Yuan,           Mark Liberman (all LDC)

   

     

Wednesday, May 29, 15:20 - 17:20, Poster Area         D

   

     

USING MULTIPLE VERSIONS OF SPEECH INPUT IN           PHONE RECOGNITION

   

     

Authors: Mark Liberman (LDC), Jiahong Yuan         (LDC), Andreas Stolcke, Wen Wang, Vikramjit Mitra

   

Please look for LDC’s exhibition at Booth #53       in the Vancouver Convention Centre. We hope to see you there!

Early renewing members save         on fees

      To date just over 100 organizations have       joined for Membership Year (MY) 2013.   For the sixth straight year,       LDC's early renewal discount program has resulted in significant       savings for our members.  Organizations
      that renewed membership or joined early for MY2013 saved over       US$50,000! MY 2012 members are still eligible for a 5% discount       when renewing for MY2013. This discount will apply throughout       2013.
     
      Organizations joining LDC can take advantage of membership       benefits including free membership year data as well as discounts       on older LDC corpora.  For-profit members can use most LDC data       for commercial applications.  Please visit our Members
        FAQ for further information.

Commercial use and LDC data

      Has your company obtained an LDC database as a       non-member?  For-profit organizations are reminded that an LDC       membership is a pre-requisite for obtaining a commercial license       to almost all LDC databases.  Non-member organizations, including       non-member for-profit organizations, cannot use LDC data to       develop or test products for commercialization, nor can they use       LDC data in any commercial product or for any commercial purpose.        LDC data users should consult corpus-specific license agreements       for limitations on the use of certain corpora. In the case of a       small group of corpora such as American National Corpus (ANC)       Second Release (LDC2005T35), Buckwalter Arabic Morphological       Analyzer Version 2.0 (LDC2004L02), CELEX2 (LDC96L14) and all CSLU       corpora, commercial licenses must be obtained separately from the       owners of the data even if an organization is a for-profit member.

New publications

      (1) GALE
        Arabic-English Parallel Aligned Treebank -- Newswire       (LDC2013T10) was developed by LDC and contains 267,520 tokens of       word aligned Arabic and English parallel text with treebank       annotations. This material was used as training data in the DARPA       GALE  (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) program. Parallel       aligned treebanks are treebanks annotated with morphological and       syntactic structures aligned at the sentence level and the       sub-sentence level. Such data sets are useful for natural language       processing and related fields, including automatic word alignment       system training and evaluation, transfer-rule extraction, word       sense disambiguation, translation lexicon extraction and cultural       heritage and cross-linguistic studies. With respect to machine       translation system development, parallel aligned treebanks may       improve system performance with enhanced syntactic parsers, better       rules and knowledge about language pairs and reduced word error       rate.

In this release, the source Arabic data was       translated into English. Arabic and English treebank annotations       were performed independently. The parallel texts were then word       aligned. The material in this corpus corresponds to the Arabic       treebanked data appearing in Arabic Treebank: Part 3 v 3.2 (LDC2010T08)       (ATB) and to the English treebanked data in English Translation       Treebank: An-Nahar Newswire (LDC2012T02).

The source data consists of Arabic newswire       from the Lebanese publication An Nahar collected by LDC in 2002.       All data is encoded as UTF-8. A count of files, words, tokens and       segments is below.

      Note: Word count is based on the untokenized Arabic source and       token count is based on the ATB-tokenized Arabic source.

The purpose of the GALE word alignment task was       to find correspondences between words, phrases or groups of words       in a set of parallel texts. Arabic-English word alignment       annotation consisted of the following tasks:

     

Identifying different types of links:         translated (correct or incorrect) and not translated (correct or         incorrect)

   

     

Identifying sentence segments not suitable         for annotation, e.g., blank segments, incorrectly-segmented         segments, segments with foreign languages

   

     

Tagging unmatched words attached to other         words or phrases

   

GALE Arabic-English Parallel Aligned Treebank       -- Newswire is distributed via web download.

2013 Subscription Members will automatically       receive two copies of this data on disc. 2013 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) MADCAT Phase 2
        Training Set (LDC2013T09) contains all training data created       by LDC to support Phase 2 of the DARPA MADCAT (Multilingual       Automatic Document Classification Analysis and       Translation)Program. The data in this release consists of       handwritten Arabic documents, scanned at high resolution and       annotated for the physical coordinates of each line and token.       Digital transcripts and English translations of each document are       also provided, with the various content and annotation layers       integrated in a single MADCAT XML output.

The goal of the MADCAT program is to       automatically convert foreign text images into English       transcripts. MADCAT Phase 2 data was collected from Arabic source       documents in three genres: newswire, weblog and newsgroup text.       Arabic speaking scribes copied documents by hand, following       specific instructions on writing style (fast, normal, careful),       writing implement (pen, pencil) and paper (lined, unlined). Prior       to assignment, source documents were processed to optimize their       appearance for the handwriting task, which resulted in some       original source documents being broken into multiple pages for       handwriting. Each resulting handwritten page was assigned to up to       five independent scribes, using different writing conditions.

The handwritten, transcribed documents were       checked for quality and completeness, then each page was scanned       at a high resolution (600 dpi, greyscale) to create a digital       version of the handwritten document. The scanned images were then       annotated to indicate the physical coordinates of each line and       token. Explicit reading order was also labeled, along with any       errors produced by the scribes when copying the text. The       annotation results in GEDI XML output files (gedi.xml), which       include ground truth annotations and source transcripts

The final step was to produce a unified data       format that takes multiple data streams and generates a single       MADCAT XML output file with all required information. The       resulting madcat.xml file has these distinct components: (1) a       text layer that consists of the source text, tokenization and       sentence segmentation, (2)  an
      image layer that consist of bounding boxes, (3) a scribe       demographic layer that consists of scribe ID and partition       (train/test) and (4) a document metadata layer.

This release includes 27,814 annotation files       in both GEDI XML and MADCAT XML formats (gedi.xml and madcat.xml)       along with their corresponding scanned image files in TIFF format.

MADCAT Phase 2 Training Set is distributed on       six DVD-ROM.

2013 Subscription Members will automatically       receive two copies of this data on disc. 2013 Standard Members may       request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.        Non-members may license this data for US$2500.

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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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We are happy to announce the release of DEMAND, a set of real-world
16-channel noise recordings designed for the evaluation of microphone
array processing techniques.

http://www.irisa.fr/metiss/DEMAND/

1.5 h of noise data were recorded in 18 different indoor and outdoor
environments and are available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

Joachim Thiemann (CNRS - IRISA)
Nobutaka Ito (University of Tokyo)
Emmanuel Vincent (Inria Nancy - Grand Est)

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