October 2011 Newsletter
Friday, October 21, 2011
New Corpora
2008 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Set
Spanish Gigaword Third Edition
Announcements
Fall 2011 LDC Data Scholarships Recipients
LDC is pleased to announce the student recipients of the Fall 2011 LDC Data Scholarship program! The LDC Data Scholarship program provides university students with access to LDC data at no-cost. Data scholarships are offered twice a year to correspond to the Fall and Spring semesters. Students are asked to complete an application which consists of a data use proposal and letter of support from their academic adviser.
LDC received many strong applications from students attending universities across the globe. We've reviewed all the applications, and after careful consideration, we have selected four scholarship recipients! These students will receive no-cost copies of LDC data:
Haris B C - Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (India), Electronics & Electrical Engineering. Haris has been awarded a copy of 2005 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Training Data (LDC2011S01) and 2005 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Test Data (LDC2011S04) to evaluate the performance of a sparse representation speaker verification system.
Friðjón Guðjohnsen - Reykjavik University (Iceland), Computer Science. Friðjón has been awarded a copy of Treebank-3 (LDC99T42) to be used in the development of tagging methods to improve the accuracy of tagging Icelandic texts.
Leili Javadpour - Louisiana State University (USA), Engineering Science. Leili has been awarded a copy of BBN Pronoun Coreference and Entity Type Corpus (LDC2005T33) and Message Understanding Conference (MUC) 7 (LDC2001T02) for her work in pronominal anaphora resolution.
Jad Makhlouta - American University of Beirut (Lebanon), Electrical and Computer Engineering. Jad has been awarded a copy of LDC Standard Arabic Morphological Analyzer (SAMA) Version 3.1 (LDC2010L01) for his work in Arabic text mining.
Please join us in congratulating our student recipients! Look for our upcoming announcements about the submissions deadlines for the Spring 2012 LDC Data Scholarship program.
LDC Data - Now on Blu-ray
LDC is pleased to announce that the Blu-ray revolution has come to linguistic data! We are now offering select databases on Blu-ray Disc (BD). With BD, we'll be able to distribute some of our larger databases using a smaller number of discs. BDs also have the potential to be read more quickly than DVDs, which means faster access to data. To introduce our Blu-ray option, we would like to announce that the following databases will now be distributed on BD in addition to DVD-ROM:
LDC2011T07 English Gigaword Fifth Edition, now available on 1 Blu-ray Disc
LDC2006T13 Web 1T 5-gram Version 1, now available on 2 Blu-ray Discs
Organizations with licenses to English Gigaword Fifth Edition will be given the opportunity to 'swap' their DVDs for BDs. New licensees for Web 1T 5-gram have the option to select BD or DVD media.
We expect to extend the BD option over time to other corpora in the catalog and to new releases.
LDC at NWAV 2011
NWAV’s 40th Anniversary Conference will be hosted by Georgetown University from October 27-30 and LDC will be on-hand to celebrate! Please stop by the LDC exhibition at any point during the main conference and be sure to attend LDC’s pre-conference workshop on “Demographic Coding for Sociolinguistic Corpus Archive Preparation” from 4.00 – 6.00 pm on Thursday, October 27. This workshop will be hosted by LDC Executive Director Christopher Cieri and Malcah Yaeger-Dror of the University of Arizona. It has two stated goals:
1) to catalog the need for more detailed demographic categories based on field experience that other researchers can and should exploit both for their own immediate analyses, and to facilitate sharing among research groups, and
2) to encourage the use of a core set of demographic metadata coding options.
NWAV registration options can be found here. We hope to see you there! Please visit LDC’s Facebook page to follow our conference activities.