In this newsletter: LDC data and commercial technology development

New publications: L2-KSU Native and Non-Native Arabic Speechhttps://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2024S11 MATERIAL Somali-English Language Packhttps://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2024S10

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New publications: L2-KSU Native and Non-Native Arabic Speechhttps://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2024S11 was developed by King Saud Universityhttp://ksu.edu.sa/en/ (KSU) and contains approximately six hours of Modern Standard Arabic read speech from 80 subjects, along with transcripts and speaker metadata.

The speech data was collected in 2022 from 40 native and 40 non-native speakers. Native speakers were from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Palestine, and provided audio recordings through the crowd sourcing platform Khamsathttps://khamsat.com/. Non-native speakers were Central and West African students enrolled in KSU's Arabic Linguistics Institute; they provided speech recordings on site. All subjects read a series of ten sentences, repeating each sentence multiple times.

2024 members can access this corpus through their LDC accounts provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

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MATERIAL Somali-English Language Packhttps://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2024S10 was developed by Appenhttp://www.appen.com/ for the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) MATERIALhttps://www.iarpa.gov/index.php/research-programs/material (Machine Translation for English Retrieval of Information in Any Language) program. It contains 80 hours of Somali conversational telephone speech, transcripts, English translations, annotations, and queries.

Calls were made using different telephones (e.g., mobile, landline) from a variety of environments. Transcripts cover approximately 10% of the speech files, and approximately 4% of the speech files were translated into English. This release also includes domain annotations, English queries, and their relevance annotations.

The MATERIAL program focused on underserved languages with the ultimate goal to build cross language information retrieval systems to find speech and text content using English search queries.

2024 members can access this corpus through their LDC accounts provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. Non-members may license this data for a fee.

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