Contents

1 . Message from the board

 Dear members,

 

The board
 

 

 

 

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2 . Editorial

 Dear Members, 

 You will find hereunder the May issue of ISCApad. Some of you complain about the size of the last issues. Our aim is to provide the most exhaustive information. I fully agree that this information is available on the web but in ISCApad it is gathered in a single place. We are still working to create a more compact version pointing towards information available on our web. We remain convinced that pushed information is more read. Thanks to all of you who devote some minutes to send their opinion about ISCApad: positive and negative comments are both encouraging. I am just disappointed by indifference.Chris Wellekens

Institut Eurecom

Sophia Antipolis France

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3 . ISCA News

3-1 . ISCA Scientific Achievement Medalist 2008

ISCA Scientific Achievement Medal for 2008  It is with great pleasure that I announce the ISCA Medalist for 2008 - Hiroya Fujisaki. Prof. Fujisaki has contributed to the speech research community in so many aspects, in speech analysis, synthesis and prosody, that it will be a very hard task for me to summarize his long list of achievements. He is also the founder of the ICSLP series of conferences which, being now fully integrated as one of ISCA's yearly conferences, will have its 10th anniversary this year.


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3-2 . ISCA Fellows

ISCA Fellows, Call for Nominations

In 2007, ISCA will begin its Fellow Program to recognize and honor  outstanding members who have made significant contributions to the field  of speech science and technology.  To qualify for this  distinction, a candidate must have been an ISCA member for five years or  more with a minimum of ten years experience in the field.  Nominations  may be made by any ISCA member (see Nomination Form).  The nomination  must be accompanied by references from three current ISCA Fellows (or, during the first three years of the program, by ISCA Board members). A Fellow may be recognized by his/her outstanding technical contributions and/or continued significant service to ISCA.  The candidate's technical contribution should be summarized in the nomination in terms of publications, patents, projects, prototypes and their impact in the community.

Fellows will be selected by a Fellow Selection Committee of nine members who each serve three-year terms.  In the first year of the program, the Committee will be formed by ISCA Board members.  Over the next three years, one third of the members of the Selection Committee will be replaced by ISCA Fellows until the Committee consists entirely of ISCA Fellows.  Members of the Committee will be chosen by the ISCA Board.
 
The committee will hold a virtual meeting during June to evaluate the current years nominations.
 
Nominations should be submitted on the form provided at http://www.isca-speech.org/fellows.html.  Nominations should be submitted before May 23rd 2008.

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4 . SIG's activities

  • A list of Speech Interest Groups can be found on our web.

     

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4-1 . SLaTE

The International Speech Communication Association Special Interest Group (ISCA SIG) on

Speech and Language Technology in Education

 

A special interest group was created in mid-September 2006 at the Interspeech 2006 conference in Pittsburgh. This is its official website. On this site you can find information about the SIG.

 

The next SLaTE ITRW will be in 2009 in England; here is early information about this exciting meeting!

 

OUR STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

The purpose of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Special Interest Group on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE) shall be to promote interest in the use of speech and natural language processing for education; to provide members of ISCA with a special interest in speech and language technology in education with a means of exchanging news of recent research developments and other matters of interest in Speech and Language Technology in Education; to sponsor meetings and workshops on that subject that appear to be timely and worthwhile, operating within the framework of ISCA's by-laws for SIGs; and to provide and make available resources relevant to speech and language technology in education, including text and speech corpora, analysis tools, analysis and generation software, research papers and generated data.

 

Activities

  SLaTE Workshops

SLaTE ITRW Workshop October 1-3 2007 in Farmington Pennsylvania.

You can obtain proceedings of this ITRW from ISCA.

 

OTHER Workshops AND RELATED MEETINGS

 

We hark back to the first meeting of researchers interested in this area that was organized by our colleagues at KTH and held in Marholmen Sweden in 1998 http://www.speech.kth.se/still/.

 

 

Another meeting of interest in our field was held in Venice in 2004. It was organized by Rodolfo Delmonte.  http://www.isca-speech.org/archive/icall2004/index.html

 

A very interesting session was held at Interspeech 2006 by Patti Price and Abeer Alwan. The papers were reviewed by four panelists and you can see the panelists’ slides here.

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4-2 . INVITATION « JEUNES CHERCHEURS » AUX JOURNÉES D’ÉTUDES SUR LA PAROLE 2008 (in french)

Dans le cadre de sa politique d’ouverture internationale, et en continuité de l’action lancée lors des JEPs 2004 au Maroc, et 2006 à Dinard, 
 
l’AFCP invite des étudiants ou jeunes chercheurs de la communauté Communication Parlée rattachés à des laboratoires situés hors de France 
à participer à la conférence JEP-TALN 2008 (Avignon, 9-13 juin 2008, http://www.lia.univ-avignon.fr/jep-taln08/).
 
Cette aide couvrira les frais de transport, d’hébergement et d’inscription de quelques (4/5) jeunes chercheurs venus de l’étranger.
 
Modalités de candidature :
Le candidat devra envoyer à ferrane@irit.fr ET Irina.Illina@loria.fr * AVANT LE 26 AVRIL 2008 * le dossier de candidature (voir pièce jointe) comportant :
•    un CV succinct présentant les activités scientifiques du candidat et sa formation universitaire, 
•    un paragraphe expliquant la motivation du candidat et mettant en valeur les retombées attendues d’une participation aux JEP-TALN 2008,
•    une estimation des frais de transport (voir ci-dessous).
Le dossier devra être accompagné d’une lettre de recommandation du directeur de recherche pour les étudiants
 
Remarques et Calendrier :
- Les décisions d’acceptation seront rendues pour le *5 mai 2008*
- La soumission et l’acceptation d’une contribution scientifique aux JEPs n’est pas un critère de selection pour cette invitation
- Priorité sera donnée aux candidats venant de pays peu représentés aux JEP
- Pour votre estimation de frais de transport : les aéroports les plus proches sont : Aéroport Avignon Caumont (www.avignon.aeroport.fr/), Aéroport Marseille-Provence (www.marseille.aeroport.fr) ou Aéroports de Paris (www.aeroportsdeparis.fr); la gare la plus proche est Avignon TGV ou Avignon Centre (voir www.voyages-sncf.com pour les tarifs de train).
 
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5 . Future ISCA Conferences and workshops (ITRW)

5-1 . INTERSPEECH 2008

INTERSPEECH 2008 incorporating SST 08 

September 22-26, 2008

Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre

Brisbane, Australia

http://www.interspeech2008.org/

 

Interspeech is the world's largest and most comprehensive conference on Speech

Science and Speech Technology. We invite original papers in any related area,

including (but not limited to):

             Human Speech Production, Perception and Communication; 

             Speech and Language Technology; 

             Spoken Language Systems; and 

 

            Applications, Resources, Standardisation and Evaluation

  • In addition, a number of Special Sessions on selected topics have been organised and we invite you to submit for these also (see website for a complete list).

    Interspeech 2008 has two types of submission formats: Full 4-page Papers and

     Short 1-page Papers. Prospective authors are invited to submit papers in either

     format via the conference website by 7 April 2008. 

     

    Important Dates 

    Paper Submission: Monday, 7 April 2008, 3pm GMT 

    Notification of Acceptance/Rejection: Monday, 16 June 2008, 3pm GMT 

    Early Registration Deadline: Monday, 7 July 2008, 3pm GMT 

    Tutorial Day: Monday, 22 September 2008 

    Main conference: 23-26 September 2008 

     For more information please visit the website http://www.interspeech2008.org

     

    Chairman: Denis Burnham, MARCS, University of West Sydney.   

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5-2 . INTERSPEECH 2009

Brighton, UK,
Conference Website
Chairman: Prof. Roger Moore, University of Sheffield.

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5-3 . INTERSPEECH 2010

Chiba, Japan
Conference Website
ISCA is pleased to announce that INTERSPEECH 2010 will take place in Makuhari-Messe, Chiba, Japan, September 26-30, 2010. The event will be chaired by Keikichi Hirose (Univ. Tokyo), and will have as a theme "Towards Spoken Language Processing for All - Regardless of Age, Health Conditions, Native Languages, Environment, etc."

 

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5-4 . ITRW on Speech analysis and processing for knowledge discovery

June 4 - 6, 2008
Aalborg, Denmark
Workshop website   http://www.es.aau.dk/ITRW/ 

 

Humans are very efficient at capturing information and messages in speech, and they often perform this task effortlessly even when the signal is degraded by noise, reverberation and channel effects. In contrast, when a speech signal is processed by conventional spectral analysis methods, significant cues and useful information in speech are usually not taken proper advantage of, resulting in sub-optimal performance in many speech systems. There exists, however, a vast literature on speech production and perception mechanisms and their impacts on acoustic phonetics that could be more effectively utilized in modern speech systems. A re-examination of these knowledge sources is needed. On the other hand, recent advances in speech modelling and processing and the availability of a huge collection of multilingual speech data have provided an unprecedented opportunity for acoustic phoneticians to revise and strengthen their knowledge and develop new theories. Such a collaborative effort between science and technology is beneficial to the speech community and it is likely to lead to a paradigm shift for designing next-generation speech algorithms and systems. This, however, calls for a focussed attention to be devoted to analysis and processing techniques aiming at a more effective extraction of information and knowledge in speech.
Objectives:
The objective of this workshop is to discuss innovative approaches to the analysis of speech signals, so that it can bring out the subtle and unique characteristics of speech and speaker. This will also help in discovering speech cues useful for improving the performance of speech systems significantly. Several attempts have been made in the past to explore speech analysis methods that can bridge the gap between human and machine processing of speech. In particular, the time varying aspects of interactions between excitation and vocal tract systems during production seem to elude exploitation. Some of the explored methods include all-pole and polezero modelling methods based on temporal weighting of the prediction errors, interpreting the zeros of speech spectra, analysis of phase in the time and transform domains, nonlinear (neural network) models for information extraction and integration, etc. Such studies may also bring out some finer details of speech signals, which may have implications in determining the acoustic-phonetic cues needed for developing robust speech systems.
The Workshop:
G will present a full-morning common tutorial to give an overview of the present stage of research linked to the subject of the workshop
G will be organised as a single series of oral and poster presentations
G each oral presentation is given 30 minutes to allow for ample time for discussion
G is an ideal forum for speech scientists to discuss the perspectives that will further future research collaborations.
Potential Topic areas:
G Parametric and nonparametric models
G New all-pole and pole-zero spectral modelling
G Temporal modelling
G Non-spectral processing (group delay etc)
G Integration of spectral and temporal processing
G Biologically-inspired speech analysis and processing
G Interactions between excitation and vocal tract systems
G Characterization and representation of acoustic phonetic attributes
G Attributed-based speaker and spoken language characterization
G Analysis and processing for detecting acoustic phonetic attributes
G Language independent aspects of acoustic phonetic attributes detection
G Detection of language-specific acoustic phonetic attributes
G Acoustic to linguistic and acoustic phonetic mapping
G Mapping from acoustic signal to articulator configurations
G Merging of synchronous and asynchronous information
G Other related topics
Registration
Fees for early and late registration for ISCA and non-ISCA members will be made available on the website during September 2007.
Venue:
The workshop will take place at Aalborg University, Department of Electronic Systems, Denmark. See the workshop website for further and latest information.
Accommodation:
There are a large number of hotels in Aalborg most of them close to the city centre. The list of hotels, their web sites and telephone numbers are given on the workshop website. Here you will also find information about transportation between the city centre and the university campus.
How to reach Aalborg:
Aalborg Airport is half an hour away from the international Copenhagen Airport. There are many daily flight connections between Copenhagen and Aalborg. Flying with Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS) or one of the Star Alliance companies to Copenhagen enables you to include Copenhagen-Aalborg into the entire ticket, and this way reducing the full transportation cost. There is also an hourly train connection between the two cities; the train ride lasts approx. five hours
Organising Committee:
Paul Dalsgaard, B. Yegnanarayana, Chin-Hui Lee, Paavo Alku, Rolf Carlson, Torbjørn Svendsen,

http://www.es.aau.dk/ITRW/
 


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5-5 . ITRW on experimental linguistics

August 2008, Athens, Greece
Website
Prof. Antonis Botinis


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5-6 . International Conference on Auditory-Visual Speech Processing AVSP 2008

Dates: 26-29 September 2008Location: Moreton Island, Queensland, Australia
Website: http://express.hid.ri.cmu.edu/AVSP2008/Main.html

AVSP 2008 will be held as an ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop at
Tangalooma Wild Dolphin Resort on Moreton Island from the 26-29
September 2008. AVSP 2008 is a satellite conference to Interspeech 2008,
being held in Brisbane from the 22-26 September 2008. Tangalooma is
located at close distance from Brisbane, so that attendance at AVSP 2008
can easily be combined with participation in Interspeech 2008.

Auditory-visual speech production and perception by human and machine is
an interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic field which has attracted
speech scientists, cognitive psychologists, phoneticians, computational
engineers, and researchers in language learning studies. Since the
inaugural workshop in Bonas in 1995, Auditory-Visual Speech Processing
workshops have been organised on a regular basis (see an overview at the
avisa website). In line with previous meetings, this conference will
consist of a mixture of regular presentations (both posters and oral),
and lectures by invited speakers.

Topics include but are not limited to:
- Machine recognition
- Human and machine models of integration
- Multimodal processing of spoken events
- Cross-linguistic studies
- Developmental studies
- Gesture and expression animation
- Modelling of facial gestures
- Speech synthesis
- Prosody
- Neurophysiology and neuro-psychology of audition and vision
- Scene analysis

Paper submission:
Details of the paper submission procedure will be available on the
website in a few weeks time.

Chairs:
Simon Lucey
Roland Goecke
Patrick Lucey

 

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5-7 . Christian Benoit workshop on Speech and Face to Face Communication

NEW Deadline for sending one page abstract = JUNE 9TH


Ten years after our colleague Christian Benoît departed, the mark that
he left is still very vivid in the international community. There will
soon be several occasions to honour his memory: during the next
Interspeech conference (Christian was secretary of the ESCA, future
ISCA, for a long time, the association is a French association of the
type described in the 1901 law and its official headquarters are still
in Grenoble), as well as during the next AVSP workshop (workshop of
which he was one of the creators). The Christian Benoît Association was
created in 1999 and regularly awards young researchers the "Christian
Benoît prize" to promote their research (the 4^th prize was awarded to
the phonetician Susanne Fuchs in 2007). The Christian Benoît association
http://www.icp.inpg.fr/ICP/_communication.fr.html#prixcb), along with
ICP, now Speech and Cognition Department of Gipsa-lab
(http://www.gipsa-lab.inpg.fr <http://www.gipsa-lab.inpg.fr/>), are
organizing a workshop/summer school to Christian Benoît’s memory, in the
line of his innovative and enthusiastic research style and aiming at
exploring the topic of "Speech and Face to Face Communication" in a
pluridisciplinary perspective: neuroscience, cognitive psychology,
phonetics, linguistics and computer modelling. The workshop "Speech and
Face to Face Communication" will be organized around 11 invited
conferences. All researchers from the field are invited to participate
through a call for papers and students will be encouraged to widely
attend the workshop and present their work.

Website: http://www.icp.inpg.fr/~dohen/face2face/

Deadline for sending one page abstracts: June 9th (see Call for Papers
<http://ww.icp.inpg.fr/%7Edohen/face2face/CallForPapers.html>)

You can subscribe to the Christian Benoît Association by sending 15
euros (active member; 45 euros or more, benefactors) to Pascal Perrier,
secretary of the association: Pascal.Perrier@gipsa-lab.inpg.fr
<mailto:Pascal.Perrier@gipsa-lab.inpg.fr>.

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6 . Books, databases and softwares

6-1 . Books

La production de la parole
Author: Alain Marchal, Universite d'Aix en Provence, France
Publisher: Hermes Lavoisier
Year: 2007

Speech enhancement-Theory and Practice
Author: Philipos C. Loizou, University of Texas, Dallas, USA
Publisher: CRC Press
Year:2007

Speech and Language Engineering
Editor: Martin Rajman
Publisher: EPFL Press, distributed by CRC Press
Year: 2007

Human Communication Disorders/ Speech therapy
This interesting series can be listed on Wiley website

Incurses em torno do ritmo da fala
Author: Plinio A. Barbosa
Publisher: Pontes Editores (city: Campinas)
Year: 2006 (released 11/24/2006)
(In Portuguese, abstract attached.) Website

Speech Quality of VoIP: Assessment and Prediction
Author: Alexander Raake
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, UK-Chichester, September 2006
Website

Self-Organization in the Evolution of Speech, Studies in the Evolution of Language
Author: Pierre-Yves Oudeyer
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Website

Speech Recognition Over Digital Channels
Authors: Antonio M. Peinado and Jose C. Segura
Publisher: Wiley, July 2006
Website

Multilingual Speech Processing
Editors: Tanja Schultz and Katrin Kirchhoff ,
Elsevier Academic Press, April 2006
Website

Reconnaissance automatique de la parole: Du signal a l'interpretation
Authors: Jean-Paul Haton
Christophe Cerisara
Dominique Fohr
Yves Laprie
Kamel Smaili
392 Pages     Publisher: Dunod

 

*Automatic Speech Recognition on Mobile Devices and over Communication 
Networks
*Editors: Zheng-Hua Tan and Børge Lindberg
Publisher: Springer, London, March 2008
website <http://asr.es.aau.dk/>
 
About this book
The remarkable advances in computing and networking have sparked an 
enormous interest in deploying automatic speech recognition on mobile 
devices and over communication networks. This trend is accelerating.
This book brings together leading academic researchers and industrial 
practitioners to address the issues in this emerging realm and presents 
the reader with a comprehensive introduction to the subject of speech 
recognition in devices and networks. It covers network, distributed and 
embedded speech recognition systems, which are expected to co-exist in 
the future. It offers a wide-ranging, unified approach to the topic and 
its latest development, also covering the most up-to-date standards and 
several off-the-shelf systems.
 
Latent Semantic Mapping: Principles & Applications
Author: Jerome R. Bellegarda, Apple Inc., USA
Publisher: Morgan & Claypool
Series: Synthesis Lectures on Speech and Audio Processing
Year: 2007
Website: http://www.morganclaypool.com/toc/sap/1/1
 

The Application of Hidden Markov Models in Speech Recognition By Mark Gales and Steve Young (University of Cambridge)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/2000000004
 
in Foundations and Tr=nds in Signal Processing (FnTSIG)
www.nowpublishers.com/SIG 
 
 
Proceedings of the IEEE
 
Special Issue on ADVANCES IN MULTIMEDIA INFORMATION RETRIEVAL
 
Volume 96, Number 4, April 2008
 
Guest Editors:
 
Alan Hanjalic, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
Rainer Lienhart, University of Augsburg, Germany
Wei-Ying Ma, Microsoft Research Asia, China
John R. Smith, IBM Research, USA
 
Through carefully selected, invited papers written by leading authors and research teams, the April 2008 issue of Proceedings of the IEEE (v.96, no.4) highlights successes of multimedia information retrieval research, critically analyzes the achievements made so far and assesses the applicability of multimedia information retrieval results in real-life scenarios. The issue provides insights into the current possibilities for building automated and semi-automated methods as well as algorithms for segmenting, abstracting, indexing, representing, browsing, searching and retrieving multimedia content in various contexts. Additionally, future challenges that are likely to drive the research in the multimedia information retrieval field for years to come are also discussed.
 
To learn more, please visit the corresponding IEEE Xplore site at
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6-2 . LDC News

 
LDC2008L01
 
LDC2008T06
 
In this month's newsletter, the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) would like to provide information on the ACL Anthology and announce the availability of two new publications.


ACL Anthology's New Home

The ACL Anthology is a digital archive of 12,500 research papers in computational linguistics, stretching back to 1965.  All papers are available for free download.  Steven Bird established the anthology in 2001, while he was associate director at the LDC.  The initial digitization of 50,000 pages of articles was possible through the generous support of institutional and individual sponsors. For the next 6 years, the anthology was hosted on the LDC website, and it came to play a central role in the day-to-day work of computational linguists the world over.  Today, conference proceedings are added to the Anthology at the time of each conference, providing immediate free access to the latest research findings.  In 2007, the digitization of legacy materials was completed and the anthology was migrated to the website of the Association for Computational Linguistics.  Steven passed on the editorship to Min-Yen Kan.  Ongoing activities with the anthology include citation linking and extraction of raw text.  The LDC is pleased to have to have contributed to the development of the anthology and wishes the current editor continued success in providing this valuable resource.  Visit the ACL website for further information on ACL conferences, membership, and publications.

New Publications

(1) An English Dictionary of the Tamil Verb represents over twenty-five years of work led by Harold F. Schiffman, Professor, emeritus, of Dravidian Lingusitics and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania's Department of South Asia Studies. It contains translations for 6597 English verbs and defines 9716 Tamil verbs. This release presents the dictionary in two formats: Adobe PDF and XML. The PDF format displays the dictionary in a human readable form and is suitable for printing. The XML version is a purely electronic form intended mainly for application development and the creation of searchable electronic databases.

In the electronic XML version each entry contains the following: the English entry or head word; the Tamil equivalent (in Tamil script and transliteration); the verb class and transitivity specification; the spoken Tamil pronunciation (audio files in mp3 format); the English definition(s); additional Tamil entries (if applicable); example sentences or phrases in Literary Tamil, Spoken Tamil (with a corresponding audio file in .mp3 format) and an English translation; and Tamil synonyms or near-synonyms, where appropriate. It is expected that the dictionary will be useful for Tamil learners, scholars and others interested in the Tamil language.

An English Dictionary of the Tamil Verb seeks to meet needs not currently addressed by existing English-Tamil dictionaries. The main goal of this dictionary is to get an English-knowing user to a Tamil verb, irrespective of whether he or she begins with an English verb or some other item, such as an adjective; this is because what may be a verb in Tamil may in fact not be a verb in English, and vice versa. Since the number of English entries is limited (slightly less than 10,000) there may not be main entries for certain low-frequency items like 'pounce' but this item does appear as a synonym for 'jump, leap', and some other verbs, so searching for 'pounce' will get the user to a Tamil verb via the synonym field. The main goal is therefore to specifically concentrate on supplying the kinds of information lacking in all previous attempts to capture the equivalencies between English and Tamil. An English Dictionary of the Tamil Verb is distributed on one DVD-ROM.

2008 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus. 2008 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Nonmembers may license this data for US$300.

*

(2) GALE Phase 1 Chinese Blog Parallel Text was prepared by the LDC and consists of 313K characters (277 files) of Chinese blog text and its translation selected from eight sources. This release was used as training data in Phase 1 of the DARPA-funded GALE program.

The task of preparing this corpus involved four stages of work: data scouting, data harvesting, formatting, and data selection.

Data scouting involved manually searching the web for suitable blog text. Data scouts were assigned particular topics and genres along with a production target in order to focus their web search. Formal annotation guidelines and a customized annotation toolkit helped data scouts to manage the search process and to track progress.

Data scouts logged their decisions about potential text of interest (sites, threads and posts) to a database. A nightly process queried the annotation database and harvested all designated URLs. Whenever possible, the entire site was downloaded, not just the individual thread or post located by the data scout.

Once the text was downloaded, its format was standardized so that the data could be more easily integrated into downstream annotation processes. Typically a new script was required for each new domain name that was identified. After scripts were run, an optional manual process corrected any remaining formatting problems.

The selected documents were then reviewed for content suitability using a semi-automatic process. A statistical approach was used to rank a document's relevance to a set of already-selected documents labeled as "good." An annotator then reviewed the list of relevance-ranked documents and selected those which were suitable for a particular annotation task or for annotation in general.

Manual sentence units/segments (SU) annotation was also performed on a subset of files following LDC's Quick Rich Transcription specification. Three types of end of sentence SU were identified: statement SU, question SU, and incomplete SU.

After files were selected, they were reformatted into a human-readable translation format, and the files were then assigned to professional translators for careful translation. Translators followed LDC's GALE Translation guidelines, which describe the makeup of the translation team, the source, data format, the translation data format, best practices for translating certain linguistic features (such as names and speech disfluencies), and quality control procedures applied to completed translations.  GALE Phase 1 Chinese Blog Parallel Text is distributed via web download.

2008 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus on disc. 2008 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora. Nonmembers may license this data for US$1500.

 
Ilya Ahtaridis
Membership Coordinator

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Linguistic Data Consortium                     Phone: (215) 573-1275
University of Pennsylvania                       Fax: (215) 573-2175 3600 Market St., Suite 810                        
  
Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA                   http://www.ldc.upenn.edu
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6-3 . Question Answering on speech transcripts (QAst)

  • The QAst organizers are pleased to announce the release of the development dataset for
    the CLEF-QA 2008 track "Question Answering on Speech Transcripts" (QAst).
    We take this opportunity to launch a first call for participation in
    this evaluation exercise.

    QAst is a CLEF-QA track that aims at providing an evaluation framework
    for QA technology on speech transcripts, both manual and automatic.
    A detailed description of this track is available at:
    http://www.lsi.upc.edu/~qast <http://www.lsi.upc.edu/~qast>

    It is the second evaluation for the QAst track.
    Last year (QAst 2007), factual questions had been generated for two
    distinct corpora (in English language only). This year, in addition to
    factual questions,
    some definition questions are generated, and five corpora covering three
    different languages are used (3 corpora in English, 1 in Spanish and 1
    in French).

    Important dates:

    # 15 June 2008: evaluation set released
    # 30 June 2008: submission deadline

    The pilot track is organized jointly by the Technical University of
    Catalonia (UPC), the Evaluations and Language resources Distribution
    Agency (ELDA) and Laboratoire d'Informatique pour la Mécanique et les
    Sciences de l'Ingénieur (LIMSI).

    If you are interested in participating please send an email to Jordi
    Turmo (turmo_AT_lsi.upc.edu) with "QAst" in the subject line.