December 2009 Newsletter

New Corpora

ACL Anthology Reference Corpus

Arabic Gigaword Fourth Edition

Announcements

LDC and Oxford University Receive Digging into Data Challenge Grant
LDC and its research team partner Oxford University are one of eight international research teams to have been awarded the first Digging into Data Challenge grants for projects that promote innovative humanities and social science research using large-scale data analysis. Four leading research agencies sponsor the international competition: The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) from the United Kingdom, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation (NSF) from the United States and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council from Canada.

LDC and Oxford University (with the participation of the The British Library) have been funded by NSF and JISC, respectively, for a project entitled “Mining a Year of Speech,” which will focus on creating tools to enable rapid and flexible access to more than 9,000 hours of spoken audio files. Those files contain a wide variety of speech drawn from some of the leading British and American spoken word corpora, allowing for news kinds of linguistic analysis.

Further information about the Digging into Data Challenge can be found on the project website.

LDC to Close for Winter Break
LDC will be closed from Friday, December 25, 2009 through Friday, January 1, 2010 in accordance with the University of Pennsylvania Winter Break Policy.  Our offices will reopen on Monday, January 4, 2010.  Requests received for membership renewals and corpora will be processed at that time.

Best wishes for a happy and safe holiday season!

Planned Maintenance - Jan 10, 2010
Please take note:

As a result of planned electrical maintenance, LDC's website, including the Intranet and catalog, will not be accessible on Sunday, January 10, 2010 from 12 AM EST to approximately 4 AM EST.  We apologize for any inconvenience this will cause.