December 2011 Newsletter

New Corpora

2006 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set Part 1

2008 NiST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Supplement Set

Announcements

Spring 2012 LDC Data Scholarship Program - Deadline Fast Approaching
The deadline for the Spring 2012 LDC Data Scholarship Program is less than a month away! Applications are being accepted through January 15, 2012. 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.

Students will need to complete an application which consists of a data use proposal and letter of support from their adviser. 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.

LDC Exhibiting at LSA 2012 Annual Meeting
LDC looks forward to mingling with linguists and language specialists when we exhibit at the 86th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). The main conference will be held over January 5-8, 2012 at the Portland, OR Hilton and Executive Tower and the exhibit hall will be open from January 6-8th (limited hours on Sunday the 8th). Please stop by our display for news on what 2012 will hold for LDC and to receive some of our conference giveaways.

LSA 2012 will feature plenary talks on the following topics:

• Patrice Speeter Beddor (University of Michigan): "The Dynamics of Speech Perception: Constancy, Variation, and Change"
• Dan Jurafsky (Stanford University): "Computing Meaning: Learning and Extracting Meaning from Text"
• Ted Supalla (University of Rochester): "Rethinking the Emergence of Grammatical Structure in Signed Languages: New Evidence from Variation and Historical Change in American Sign Language"

For further information visit the LSA Annual Meeting website. If you would like to learn more about LDC’s conference preparations, please ‘like’ our Facebook page.

We hope to see you there!

LDC Hosts Satellite Workshop at LSA 2012
LDC will co-host a satellite workshop entitled Sociolinguistic Archival Preparation on January 4-5, 2012 in conjunction with the LSA 2012 Annual Meeting  in Portland, OR.  This two-day workshop will focus on techniques to permit the archiving of data, for cross-community sharing of corpora as well as for subsequent 'panel' studies. Recent discussions within the field have concluded that present protocols need to be expanded to permit adequate archiving. Specifically:

• Institutional Review Board (IRB) paperwork needs to be adapted to provide protection for interviewees while permitting their speech data to be more generally sharable (and therefore archiveable);
• Demographic, situational, and attitudinal protocols are needed to provide a unified resource serving multiple research communities as well as the contributing researchers.

The sooner IRB forms and research protocols are aligned with each other, the sooner sharable, archiveable corpora will become available, permitting intergroup comparison and interdisciplinary collaboration.

LDC's Executive Director, Christopher Cieri, and LDC consultant and University of Arizona scholar, Malcah Yaeger-Dror, are the workshop organizers. This workshop is funded in part by the National Science Foundation (BCS#1144480). Further information about the workshop is available on the LSA Annual Meeting website.

LDC to Close for Winter Break
LDC will be closed from Monday, December 26, 2011 through Monday, January 2, 2012 in accordance with the University of Pennsylvania Winter Break Policy.  Our offices will reopen on Tuesday, January 3, 2012.  Requests received for membership renewals and corpora during the Winter Break will be processed at that time.

Best wishes for a happy and safe holiday season!