November 2009 Newsletter

New Corpora

2007 NIST Language Recognition Evaluation Supplemental Training Set

French Gigaword Second Edition

NXT Switchboard Annotations

Announcements

LDC Incentives:  Early Renewal Discounts for Membership Year (MY) 2010
LDC appreciates the important contribution LDC members make through their continued support of the consortium.  We would like to invite all current and previous members of LDC to renew for Membership Year (MY) 2010.  For MY2010, LDC is pleased to maintain membership fees at last year’s rates – membership fees will not increase.  Additionally, in last month's newsletter, we announced an LDC Incentives Package which will include a host of incentives to help lower the cost of LDC membership and data licensing fees.  As part of this package, LDC will extend discounts to members who keep their membership current and who join early in the year.

The details of our Early Renewal Discounts for MY2010 are as follows:

Organizations who joined for MY2009, will receive a 5% discount when renewing. This discount will apply throughout 2010, regardless of time of renewal. MY2009 members renewing before March 1, 2010 will receive an additional 5% discount, for a total 10% discount off the membership fee.

New members as well as organizations who did not join for MY2009, but who held membership in any of the previous MY's (1993-2008), will also be eligible for a 5% discount provided that they join/renew before March 1, 2010.

Publications for MY2010 are still being planned but it will be another productive year with a broad selection of publications.  The working titles of data sets we intend to provide include:

• Arabic Treebank: Part 2 v 4.0
• Chinese Treebank 7.0   
• Chinese Web N-gram Version 1.0
• Fisher Spanish
• LCTL Bengali
• NPS Chat Corpus

In addition to receiving new publications, current year members of the LDC also enjoy the benefit of licensing older data at reduced costs; current year for-profit members may use most data for commercial applications.

This past year, nearly 100 organizations who renewed membership or joined early received a discount on membership fees for MY2009.  Taken together, these members saved over US$50,000!  Be sure to keep an eye out on your mail - all LDC members have been sent an invitation to join letter and renewal invoice for MY2010.  Renew early for MY2010 and save today!

LDC at NWAV 38
LDC exhibited at NWAV for the third straight year. We were delighted to interact with so many talented sociolinguistic researchers and to introduce numerous attendees to LDC and our data catalog. LDC distributed free copies of both the SLX Corpus of Classic Sociolinguistic Interviews, as per the terms of the Timebank grant, and the 2008 LDC Spoken Language Sampler, which is available for download here. We also distributed many of our newly minted data sheets, including one featuring the speech annotation tool XTrans. This tool is also freely available from our website in Linux and Windows formats.  

LDC’s Executive Director Chris Cieri and Senior Associate Director Stephanie Strassel presented papers on the following topics:

• Models of Phonological Variation for Multi-dialectal Communities: the case of L’Aquila
• Closer Still to a Robust, All Digital, Empirical, Reproducible Sociolinguistic Methodology

Thanks again to everyone who stopped by our display and we look forward to seeing you again next year!