*****************************************************************
    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
   

Top

ELRA releases free Language Resources
***************************************************

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

Top

In this                 newsletter:
             

-  Fall 2013 Data Scholarship Program                  -
             

New                 publications:
             

-            Chinese Proposition Bank 3.0  -
       

-            GALE Arabic-English Parallel Aligned Treebank             -- Broadcast News Part 1 -

Fall 2013 Data           Scholarship Program

Applications
        are now being accepted through September 16, 2013, 11:59PM EST         for the Fall 2013 LDC Data Scholarship program! 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. The selection         process is highly competitive.
       
        The application consists of two parts:
       
        (1) Data Use Proposal. Applicants must submit a proposal         describing their intended use of the data. The proposal should         state which data the student plans to use and how the data will         benefit their research project as well as information on the         proposed methodology or algorithm.
       
        Applicants should consult the LDC Corpus           Catalog for a complete list of         data distributed by LDC. Due to certain restrictions, a handful         of LDC corpora are restricted to members of the Consortium.         Applicants are advised to select a maximum of one to two         databases.
       
        (2) Letter of Support. Applicants must submit one letter         of support from their thesis adviser or department chair. The         letter must confirm that the department or university lacks the         funding to pay the full Non-member Fee for the data and verify         the student's need for data.
       
        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.
       
        The deadline for the Fall 2013 program is Monday, September 16,         2013, 11:59PM EST.
       
     

                                                                                                                  New publications
     

(1)
      Chinese           Proposition Bank 3.0         is a continuation of the Chinese           Proposition Bank project which aims to         create a corpus of text annotated with information about basic         semantic propositions. Chinese Proposition Bank 3.0 adds         predicate-argument annotation on 187,731 words from Chinese         Treebank 7.0 (LDC2010T07). The data sources are         comprised of newswire, magazine articles, various broadcast news         and broadcast conversation programming, web newsgroups and         weblogs.

LDC
        has also released Chinese Proposition Bank 1.0 (LDC2005T23) and Chinese         Proposition Bank 2.0 (LDC2008T07).

This
        release contains the predicate-argument annotation of 173,206         verb instances and 14,525 noun instances. The annotation of         nouns is limited to nominalizations that have a corresponding         verb. The general annotation guidelines and the lexical         guidelines (called frame files) for each verbal and nominal         predicate are also included in this release. Below are some         statistics about the corpus.

     
• Total
            propositions for verbs - 173,206
     
• Total
            propositions for nouns - 14,525
     
• Total
            verbs framed - 24,642
     
• Total
            framesets - 26,467
     
• Verbs
            with multiple framesets - 1337
     
• Average
            framesets per verb - 1.07
     
• Total
            nouns framed - 1,421
     
• Total
            noun framesets - 1,528
     
• Nouns
            with multiple framesets - 48
     
• Average
            framesets per nouns - 1.08
   

Chinese Proposition
        Bank 3.0 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$300.

*

(2)
      GALE           Arabic-English Parallel Aligned Treebank -- Broadcast News           Part 1 was developed by LDC         and contains 115,826 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 a portion of the Arabic         treebanked data in Arabic Treebank - Broadcast News v1.0 (LDC2012T07).

The
        source data consists of Arabic broadcast news programming         collected by LDC in 2005 and 2006 from Alhurra, Aljazeera and         Dubai TV. 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. Ttoken         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 -- Broadcast News 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.

Top

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

Top

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)

Top