August 2015 Newsletter

New Corpora

Arabic Learner Corpus

GALE Phase 3 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Speech Part 1

GALE Phase 3 Arabic Broadcast Conversation Transcripts Part 1

Announcements

Fall 2015 LDC Data Scholarship Program - September 15 Deadline Approaching
Student applications for the Fall 2015 LDC Data Scholarship program are being accepted now through Tuesday, September 15, 2015, 11:59PM EST.  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. 

Applicants can email their materials to the LDC Data Scholarship program. 

LDC at Interspeech 2015
LDC will once again be exhibiting at Interspeech, held this year September 7-10 in Dresden, Germany.  Stop by booth 20 to learn more about recent developments at the Consortium and new publications.

Also, be on the lookout for the following presentations featuring LDC work:

The Effect of Spectral Slope on Pitch Perception: Jianjing Kuang (UPenn) and Mark Liberman (LDC)
Monday 7 September, Poster Session 3-9, 11:00–13:00
   
Investigating Consonant Reduction in Mandarin Chinese with Improved Forced Alignment: Jiahong Yuan and Mark Liberman (both LDC)
Wednesday 9 September, Oral Session 36-5, 17:50-18:10

LDC will post conference updates via our Twitter feed and Facebook page. We hope to see you there!   

2013 Data Pack Deadline is September 15
One month remains for not-for-profit and government organizations to create a custom data collection of eight corpora from among LDC’s 2013 releases. Selection options include: 1993-2007 United Nations Parallel Text, Chinese Treebank 8.0, CSC Deceptive Speech, GALE Arabic and Chinese speech and text releases, Greybeard, MADCAT training data, NIST 2012 Open Machine Translation (OpenMT) evaluation and progress sets, and more. The 2013 Data Pack is available for a flat rate of $3500 through September 15, 2015.

To license the Data Pack and select eight corpora, login or register for an LDC user account and add the 2013 Data Pack and each of the eight data sets to your bin. Follow the check-out procedure, sign all applicable user agreements and select payment via wire transfer, purchase order or check. LDC will adjust the invoice total to reflect the data pack fee.

To pay via credit card, add the 2013 Data Pack to your bin and check out using the system prompts. At the completion of the transaction, send an email to LDC indicating the eight data sets to include in your order.

LDC Co-organizes LSA2016 Pre-conference Workshop
University of Arizona’s Malcah Yeager-Dror and LDC’s Chris Cieri are organizing the upcoming LSA 2016 workshop “Preparing your Corpus for Archival Storage”. The session is sponsored by the National Science Foundation (BCS #1549994) and will be held on Thursday, January 7, 2016 in Washington, DC before the start of the 90th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA 2016).

The workshop will examine critical factors which must be considered when preparing data for comparison and sharing following on the topics discussed in the LSA 2012 workshop, "Coding for Sociolinguistic Archive Preparation". Invited speakers will discuss specific coding conventions for such factors as socioeconomic and educational speaker demographics, language choice, stance and footing.

There will be no additional registration fees to attend the session for those already taking part in the annual meeting. Students who are about to carry out their own fieldwork, or who have begun doing so, are eligible to apply for funding by November 2, 2015 to help defray the extra costs for attending the workshop. For more information about the speakers and topics, visit LDC’s workshop page.