December 2021 Newsletter
New Publications
BOLT English Translation Treebank – Chinese SMS/Chat
HAVIC MED Training Data – Videos, Metadata and Annotation
Announcements
LDC 2022 Membership Discounts Now Available
Now through March 1, 2022, current 2021 members receive a 10% discount for renewing their membership, and new or returning organizations receive a 5% discount. Membership remains the most economical way to access current and past LDC releases. Consult Join LDC for details on membership options and benefits.
Approaching Deadline for Spring 2022 Data Scholarship Applications
Attention students: don’t miss out on the chance to receive no-cost access to LDC data for your research. Applications for Spring 2022 data scholarships are due January 15, 2022. For more information on requirements and program rules, see LDC Data Scholarships.
Citizen Linguistics
LanguageARC, a citizen science web portal for linguistics, continues to grow with 12 language research projects currently available to the community. Two new projects seeking contributions from citizen linguists have recently been added. The Fearless Steps project will make thousands of hours of Apollo space mission communications accessible to researchers and to the public. Contributors can listen to and annotate actual audio recordings from the Apollo 11 space mission. A second new project, Les stéréotypes en français, asks contributors to identify and classify stereotypes that can be expressed in the French language. In addition to these publicly available projects, LanguageARC also enables researchers to create research projects restricted to defined private groups, such as the recent object naming task to document the Guanzhong dialect of Mandarin. Here a private, invited group of about 60 contributors yielded over 34,000 speech recordings.
Please consider becoming an active participant in the LanguageARC community by contributing to research projects. If you are a researcher interested in creating your own project on LanguageARC, please reach out via the “Contact” page on the website.
LDC Closed for Winter Break Dec. 24-Jan. 4
LDC will be closed from Friday December 24, 2021 through Tuesday, January 4, 2022 in accordance with the University of Pennsylvania Winter Break Policy. Our offices will reopen on Wednesday, January 5, 2022. Requests received by the Membership Office during Winter Break will be processed when the office reopens.