ISCA - International Speech
Communication Association


ISCApad Archive  »  2013  »  ISCApad #181  »  Resources  »  Database

ISCApad #181

Wednesday, July 10, 2013 by Chris Wellekens

5-2 Database
5-2-1ELRA - Language Resources Catalogue - Update (2013-05)

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    ELRA - Language Resources Catalogue - Update  May 2013
    *****************************************************************
   
    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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5-2-2ELRA releases free Language Resources

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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5-2-3LDC Newsletter (June 2013)

 

 

In this newsletter:
   

   

-   High School students use LDC data  -
   

   

New publications:
   

   

-  GALE Phase 2 Chinese Broadcast Conversation       Parallel Text Part 1   -
   

   

-   Greybeard   -
   

   

-   Manually Annotated Sub-Corpus Third       Release   -

   


   

High School students use LDC data
     
       A team of students at       Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in       Alexandria, VA, USA, have used an LDC database for the development       of a device to help autistic children recognize emotions.  This team was funded by a       grant from the Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam
        Initiative Program
.  InvenTeams are

      groups of high school students, teachers, and mentors that receive       grants up to US$10,000 each to invent       technological solutions to real-world problems.

   

The team set out to invent an emotive aid in       the form of a bracelet that uses a computational algorithm to       extract emotional signatures from speech and display expressed       emotions in real-time during a conversation. Potential       beneficiaries include children with autism, Asperger’s syndrome,       or similar diseases that impair the ability to detect emotion.  The algorithm employed       machine learning and neural network-based techniques to improve       accuracy and efficiency relative to current methods.
     
      The students used speech samples from the LDC database, Emotional Prosody Speech and           Transcripts (LDC2002S28) as well the Berlin Database
        of Emotional Speech
for training and testing their       algorithm. Although the samples proved to be too small to produce       an algorithm with a high degree of accuracy, the team's algorithm       did demonstrate some degree of success.  The students will present their       results at Eurekafest       at MIT in June.

   

LDC thanks the InvenTeam’s teacher, Mark       Hannum, and group leader, Suhas Gondi, for contributing to this       article.

   

  

   

New publications

   

 

   

(1) GALE Phase
        2 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Parallel Text Part 1
was       developed by LDC. Along with other corpora, the parallel text in       this release comprised training data for Phase 2 of the DARPA GALE       (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) Program. This corpus       contains Chinese source text and corresponding English       translations selected from broadcast conversation (BC) data       collected by LDC in 2006 and 2007 and transcribed by LDC or under       its direction.

   

This release includes 21 source-translation       document pairs, comprising 146,082 characters of Chinese source       text and its English translation. Data is drawn from seven       distinct Chinese programs broadcast in 2006 and 2007 from the       following sources -- China Central TV, a national and       international broadcaster in Mainland China and Phoenix TV, a Hong       Kong-based satellite television station. Broadcast conversation       programming is generally more interactive than traditional news       broadcasts and includes talk shows, interviews, call-in programs       and roundtable discussions. The programs in this release focus on       current events topics.

   

The data was transcribed by LDC staff and/or       transcription vendors under contract to LDC in accordance with       Quick Rich Transcription guidelines developed by LDC. Transcribers       indicated sentence boundaries in addition to transcribing the       text. Data was manually selected for translation according to       several criteria, including linguistic features, transcription       features and topic features. The transcribed and segmented files       were then reformatted into a human-readable translation format and       assigned to translation vendors. Translators followed LDCs Chinese       to English translation guidelines. Bilingual LDC staff performed       quality control procedures on the completed translations.

   

GALE Phase 2 Chinese Broadcast Conversation       Parallel Text Part 1 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.
   

   

     

   

(2) Greybeard       was developed by LDC and is comprised of approximately 590 hours       of English telephone conversation speech collected in October and       November 2008 by LDC. The goal was to record new telephone       conversations among subjects who had participated in one or more       previous LDC telephone collections, from Switchboard-1 (1991)       through the Mixer studies (2006).

   

A total of 172 subjects were enrolled in the       Greybeard collection, all of whom had participated in one of the       following:

   

Switchboard-1 (LDC97S62)       1991-1992: 2 subjects

   

Switchboard-2 (LDC98S75,       LDC99S79,       LDC2002S06)       1996-1997: 16 subjects

   

Mixer 1 and 2 2003-2005: 103 subjects

   

Mixer 3 2006: 51 subjects

   

Most Greybeard participants completed 12 calls.       Some subjects completed up to 24 calls. Calls were made or       received via an automatic operator system at LDC which connected       two participants and announced a topic for discussion.

   

This release consists of 4680 calls -- the       complete set of calls recorded during the Greybeard collection       (1098 calls) as well as all calls from the legacy collections that       involved the Greybeard speakers.

   

The audio from each call was captured digitally       by the operator system and stored in a separate file as raw mu-law       sample data. As the recordings were uploaded daily from the robot       operator to network disk storage, automated processes reformatted       the audio into a 2-channel SPHERE-format file for each       conversation and queued the recordings for manual audit to verify       speaker identification and to check other aspects of the       recording. Auditors provided impressionistic judgments on overall       audio quality, presence of background noise and cross-channel echo       and any other technical difficulty with the call, in addition to       confirming the speaker-ID on each channel.

   

Greybeard is distributed on five 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$7500.

   

 

   

(3) Manually Annotated
        Sub-Corpus Third Release
(MASC) was developed as part of The American National Corpus       project and consists of approximately 500,000 words of       contemporary American English written and spoken data annotated       for a wide variety of linguistic phenomena.

   

The MASC project was established to address, to       the extent possible, many of the obstacles to the creation of       large-scale, robust, multiply-annotated corpora of English       covering a wide range of genres of written and spoken language       data. The project provides appropriate data and annotations to       serve as the base for a community-wide annotation effort, together       with an infrastructure that enables the incorporation of       contributed annotations into a single, usable format that can then       be analyzed as it is or transduced to any of a variety of other       formats. Further information about the project is available at the       MASC website.

   

The source texts were drawn from the open       portion of the American National
        Corpus Second Release
, and from the Language Understanding
        Annotation Corpus
.  MASC Third

      Release includes the contents of MASC First Release (LDC2010T22)       (82,000 words) which is also available from LDC. There is no       second release.

   

All data in this release was annotated for       logical structure (paragraph, headings, etc.), token and sentence       boundaries, part of speech and lemma, shallow parse (noun and verb       chunks) and named entities (person, organization, location and       date). Portions of the corpus were also annotated for FrameNet       frames (40k full text), Penn Treebank syntax (82k) and opinion       (50k).

   

Manually Annotated Sub-Corpus Third Release 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 request this data by submitting a signed copy of LDC User
        Agreement for Non-members
.  This data

      is available at no-cost.

 

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5-2-4Appen ButlerHill

 

Appen ButlerHill 

A global leader in linguistic technology solutions

RECENT CATALOG ADDITIONS—MARCH 2012

1. Speech Databases

1.1 Telephony

1.1 Telephony

Language

Database Type

Catalogue Code

Speakers

Status

Bahasa Indonesia

Conversational

BAH_ASR001

1,002

Available

Bengali

Conversational

BEN_ASR001

1,000

Available

Bulgarian

Conversational

BUL_ASR001

217

Available shortly

Croatian

Conversational

CRO_ASR001

200

Available shortly

Dari

Conversational

DAR_ASR001

500

Available

Dutch

Conversational

NLD_ASR001

200

Available

Eastern Algerian Arabic

Conversational

EAR_ASR001

496

Available

English (UK)

Conversational

UKE_ASR001

1,150

Available

Farsi/Persian

Scripted

FAR_ASR001

789

Available

Farsi/Persian

Conversational

FAR_ASR002

1,000

Available

French (EU)

Conversational

FRF_ASR001

563

Available

French (EU)

Voicemail

FRF_ASR002

550

Available

German

Voicemail

DEU_ASR002

890

Available

Hebrew

Conversational

HEB_ASR001

200

Available shortly

Italian

Conversational

ITA_ASR003

200

Available shortly

Italian

Voicemail

ITA_ASR004

550

Available

Kannada

Conversational

KAN_ASR001

1,000

In development

Pashto

Conversational

PAS_ASR001

967

Available

Portuguese (EU)

Conversational

PTP_ASR001

200

Available shortly

Romanian

Conversational

ROM_ASR001

200

Available shortly

Russian

Conversational

RUS_ASR001

200

Available

Somali

Conversational

SOM_ASR001

1,000

Available

Spanish (EU)

Voicemail

ESO_ASR002

500

Available

Turkish

Conversational

TUR_ASR001

200

Available

Urdu

Conversational

URD_ASR001

1,000

Available

1.2 Wideband

Language

Database Type

Catalogue Code

Speakers

Status

English (US)

Studio

USE_ASR001

200

Available

French (Canadian)

Home/ Office

FRC_ASR002

120

Available

German

Studio

DEU_ASR001

127

Available

Thai

Home/Office

THA_ASR001

100

Available

Korean

Home/Office

KOR_ASR001

100

Available

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

3. Named Entity Corpora

Language

Catalogue Code

Words

Description

Arabic

ARB_NER001

500,000

These NER Corpora contain text material from a vari-ety of sources and are tagged for the following Named Entities: Person, Organization, Location, Na-tionality, Religion, Facility, Geo-Political Entity, Titles, Quantities

English

ENI_NER001

500,000

Farsi/Persian

FAR_NER001

500,000

Korean

KOR_NER001

500,000

Japanese

JPY_NER001

500,000

Russian

RUS_NER001

500,000

Mandarin

MAN_NER001

500,000

Urdu

URD_NER001

500,000

3. Named Entity Corpora

Language

Catalogue Code

Words

Description

Arabic

ARB_NER001

500,000

These NER Corpora contain text material from a vari-ety of sources and are tagged for the following Named Entities: Person, Organization, Location, Na-tionality, Religion, Facility, Geo-Political Entity, Titles, Quantities

English

ENI_NER001

500,000

Farsi/Persian

FAR_NER001

500,000

Korean

KOR_NER001

500,000

Japanese

JPY_NER001

500,000

Russian

RUS_NER001

500,000

Mandarin

MAN_NER001

500,000

Urdu

URD_NER001

500,000

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.

6. Contact Information

Prithivi Pradeep

Business Development Manager

ppradeep@appenbutlerhill.com

+61 2 9468 6370

Tom Dibert

Vice President, Business Development, North America

tdibert@appenbutlerhill.com

+1-315-339-6165

                                                         www.appenbutlerhill.com

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5-2-5OFROM 1er corpus de français de Suisse romande
Nous souhaiterions vous signaler la mise en ligne d'OFROM, premier corpus de français parlé en Suisse romande. L'archive est, dans version actuelle, d'une durée d'environ 15 heures. Elle est transcrite en orthographe standard dans le logiciel Praat. Un concordancier permet d'y effectuer des recherches, et de télécharger les extraits sonores associés aux transcriptions. 
 
Pour accéder aux données et consulter une description plus complète du corpus, nous vous invitons à vous rendre à l'adresse suivante : http://www.unine.ch/ofrom
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5-2-6Real-world 16-channel noise recordings

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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