November 2014 Newsletter

New Corpora

Boulder Lies and Truth

GALE Chinese-English Word Alignment and Tagging -- Broadcast Training Part 2

GALE Phase 2 Chinese Web Parallel Text

Announcements

Fall 2014 Data Scholarship Recipients
LDC is pleased to announce the student recipients of the Fall 2014 LDC Data Scholarship program.  The following students will receive no-cost copies of LDC data:

Mohammed Abumatar ~ University of Jordan (Jordan), Bsc Candidate, Computer Engineering.  Mohammed has been awarded a copies of MADCAT Phase 1-3 Training Data for his work in handwriting recognition.

Ramy Baly ~ American University of Beirut (Lebanon), PhD candidate, Electrical and Computer Engineering.  Ramy has been awarded a copies of Arabic Treebank Parts 1-3 for his work in opinion mining.

Abbas Khosravanai ~ Amirkabir University of Technology (Iran), PhD candidate, Computer Engineering.  Abbas has been awarded a copy of 2008 NIST Speaker Recognition for his work in robust speaker recognition.

Phuc Nguyen ~ University of North Texas (USA), PhD candidate, Computer Science and Engineering.  Phuc has been awarded a copy of Message Understanding Conference (MUC) 7 for his work in named entity recognition.

Invitation to Join for Membership Year (MY) 2015
Membership Year (MY) 2015 is open for joining.  We would like to invite all current and previous members of LDC to renew their membership as well as welcome new organizations to join the Consortium.  For MY2015, LDC is pleased to maintain membership fees at last year’s rates – membership fees will not increase.  Additionally, LDC will extend discounts on membership fees to members who keep their membership current and who join early in the year.

The details of our early renewal discounts for MY2015 are as follows:

Organizations who joined for MY2014 will receive a 10% discount when renewing before March 2, 2015. After March 2, 2015, MY2014 members are eligible for a 5% discount when renewing through the end of the year.

New members as well as organizations who did not join for MY2014, but who held membership in any of the previous MYs (1993-2013), will also be eligible for a 5% discount provided that they join/renew before March 2, 2015.

Publications for MY2015 are still being planned but we plan to release the following:

• CIEMPIESS - Mexican Spanish radio broadcast audio and transcripts   
• GALE Phase 3 and 4 data – all tasks and languages   
• Mandarin Chinese Phonetic Segmentation and Tone Corpus - phonetic segmentation and tone labels   
• RATS Speech Activity Detection  – multilanguage audio for robust speech detection and language identification
• SEAME - Mandarin-English code-switching speech
• SenSem Spanish and Catalan Lexicon and Databank - sentence semantics and verbal lexicons

Spring 2015 Data Scholarship Program
Applications are now being accepted through Thursday, January 15, 2015, 11:59PM EST for the Spring 2015 LDC Data Scholarship program. The LDC Data Scholarship program provides university students with access to LDC data at no-cost. During previous program cycles, LDC has awarded no-cost copies of LDC data to over 40 individual students and student research groups. 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.

The application consists of two parts:

(1) Data Use Proposal. Applicants must submit a proposal describing their intended use of the data. The proposal should state which data the student plans to use and how the data will benefit their research project as well as information on the proposed methodology or algorithm.

(2) Letter of Support. Applicants must submit one letter of support from their thesis adviser or department chair. The letter must verify the student's need for data and confirm that the department or university lacks the funding to pay the full non-member fee for the data or to join the Consortium.

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.

The deadline for the Spring 2015 program cycle is January 15, 2015, 11:59PM EST.

LDC is Now on Twitter
LDC now has a Twitter feed. Start following us today for updates on new corpora releases and the latest LDC news.

LDC Closed for Thanksgiving Break
LDC will be closed on Thursday, November 27, 2014 and Friday, November 28, 2013 in observance of the US Thanksgiving Holiday.  Our offices will reopen on Monday, December 1, 2014.