December 2010 Newsletter

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

New Corpora

Indian Language Part-of-Speech Tagset: Hindi

Manually Annotated Sub-Corpus First Release

NIST 2009 Open Machine Translation (OpenMT) Evaluation

Announcements

Spring 2011 LDC Data Scholarship Program
Applications are now being accepted through January 31, 2011 for the Spring 2011 LDC Data Scholarship program!  The LDC Data Scholarship program provides university students with access to LDC data at no-cost.  LDC offered data scholarships for the first time earlier this year.  We received many strong applications from students with a range of research interests.  Our student winners received no-cost copies of LDC data valued at over US$10,000.

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 application consists of two parts:

    (1) Data Use Proposal. Applicants must submit a proposal describing their intended use of the data. The proposal must contain the applicant's name, university, and field of study. The proposal should state which data the student plans to use and contain a description of their research project.  Students are advised to 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.

    (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 Spring 2011 program cycle is January 31, 2011.

LDC to Close for Winter Break
LDC will be closed from Friday, December 24, 2010 through Friday, December 31, 2010 in accordance with the University of Pennsylvania Winter Break Policy.  Our offices will reopen on Monday, January 3, 2011.  Requests received for membership renewals and corpora will be processed at that time.

Best wishes for a happy and safe holiday season!