The ELRA Newsletter July - December 2007 Vol.12 n.3&4 Contents Editor in Chief: Khalid Choukri Editors: Letter from the President and the CEO ____________________________Page 2 Victoria Arranz Valérie Mapelli The UK: an Overview of Some Current Work in HLT Hélène Mazo Martin Wynne __________________________________________________Page 3 Layout: Valérie Mapelli TwNC: a Multifaceted Dutch News Corpus Roeland Ordelman, Franciska de Jong, Arjan van Hessen, Hendri Hondorp __Page 4 Contributors: Roeland Ordelman Franciska de Jong ELRA’s Activities in HLT Evaluation ______________________________Page 8 Arjan van Hessen Hendri Hondorp New Resources ________________________________________________Page 12 Martin Wynne ISSN: 1026-8200 ELRA/ELDA CEO: Khalid Choukri 55-57, rue Brillat Savarin 75013 Paris - France Tel: (33) 1 43 13 33 33 Fax: (33) 1 43 13 33 30 E-mail: [email protected] Web sites: Signed articles represent the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the http://www.elra.info or Editors, or the official policy of the ELRA Board/ELDA staff. http://www.elda.org - 2 - Dear Colleagues, This is the last issue of 2007 and we would like to quickly highlight a number of topics on which ELRA focussed during this year. The major event for ELRA is the organisation of LREC 2008, the sixth edition in the series of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference launched by ELRA with the support of a large number of active players in the field. Therefore, ELRA and ELDA have been strongly involved in the preparation of the 6th edition that will take place in Marrakech, Morocco, from May 26th to June 1st, 2008. Strong focus has also been put on the Universal Catalogue for which we also devoted time and manpower trying to enrich it with as many resources as possible while also maintaining existing ones with updated descriptions and contacts. Over the past few months, ELRA and ELDA have continued to work on their regular activities, such as the tasks carried out within the various committees (VCom, PCom) and within a number of projects. As for this newsletter, it contains: • The UK: an overview of some current work in HLT, which gives an overview of the activities taking place in the UK with regard to HLT. • A contribution describing TwNC, the Twente News Corpus, a multifaceted corpus for Dutch. New resources have been secured for distribution. As usual, these are announced in the last section of this newsletter and consist of: • Monolingual Lexicons from the general domain: TC-STAR English Training Corpora for ASR: Recordings of Polderland Dutch Lexicon of Abbreviations and Acronyms EPPS Speech (ELRA-S0251) (ELRA-L0076) TC-STAR Spanish Training Corpora for ASR: Recordings of Polderland Dutch General Lexicon (ELRA-L0077) EPPS Speech (ELRA-S0252) Polderland Dutch Lexicon of Names (ELRA-L0078) TC-STAR English Test Corpora for ASR (ELRA-S0253) Polderland Dutch Lexicon of Business Terminology (ELRA- TC-STAR Spanish Test Corpora for ASR (ELRA-S0254)____ L0079) • Speech Telephone Database from the Orientel European-funded Polderland Dutch Lexicon of Legal Terminology (ELRA- project: L0080) Orientel United Arab Emirates MCA (Modern Colloquial Polderland Dutch Lexicon of Medical Terminology (ELRA- Arabic) (ELRA-S0258) L0081) Orientel United Arab Emirates MSA (Modern Standard Arabic) Polderland Dutch Lexicon of Social Terminology (ELRA- (ELRA-S0259) L0082) Orientel English as spoken in the United Arab Emirates (ELRA- Polderland Dutch Lexicon of Technical Terminology (ELRA- S0260) ____________________________________________ L0083) • Speech Telephone from the SpeechDat(E) European-funded pro- Macedonian Morphological Lexicon (MACPLEX) (ELRA- ject: L0084)____________________________________________ Hungarian SpeechDat(E) Database (ELRA-S0261) ________ • Phonetic lexicons from the LC-STAR European-funded project: • Speech Telephone based on the SpeechDat project conventions: LC-STAR German Phonetic Lexicon (ELRA-S0245) SpeechDat Catalan FDB Database (ELRA-S0243) ________ LC-STAR German Phonetic Lexicon in the Touristic Domain • Speech Telephone Database from the SALA European-funded (ELRA-S0246) project: LC-STAR Standard Arabic Phonetic Lexicon (ELRA-S0247) SALA II US English Database (ELRA-S0242) LC-STAR English-German Bilingual Aligned Phrasal Lexicon SALA II Portuguese from Brazil Database (ELRA-S0262) (ELRA-S0248) SALA II Spanish from Colombia Database (ELRA-S0263) LC-STAR Finnish Phonetic Lexicon (ELRA-S0255) SALA II US Spanish West Database (ELRA-S0264) ______ LC-STAR Mandarin Chinese Phonetic Lexicon (ELRA-S0256) • LC-STAR English-Finnish Bilingual Aligned Phrasal Lexicon Evaluation Packages: (ELRA-S0257) ____________________________________ AURORA-5 (AURORA-CD0005) • TC-STAR 2006 Evaluation Package - End-to-End (ELRA- Speech Microphone resources from the Speecon European-fun- E0031) ded project: TC-STAR 2007 Evaluation Packages: Japanese Speecon Database (ELRA-S0244) - ASR English (ELRA-E0025) Dutch from Belgium Speecon Database (ELRA-S0265) - ASR Spanish - CORTES (ELRA-E0026-01) Dutch from the Netherlands Speecon Database (ELRA-S0266) - ASR Spanish - EPPS (ELRA-E0026-02) Danish Speecon Database (ELRA-S0267) ________________ - ASR Mandarin Chinese (ELRA-E0027) • Speech Microphone resources from the TC-STAR European-fun- - SLT English-to-Spanish (ELRA-E0028) ded project: - SLT Spanish-to-English - CORTES (ELRA-E0029-01) TC-STAR English Training Corpora for ASR: Transcriptions of - SLT Spanish-to-English - EPPS (ELRA-E0029-02) EPPS Speech (ELRA-S0249) - SLT Chinese-to-English (ELRA-E0030) TC-STAR English-Spanish Training Corpora for Machine - End-to-End (ELRA-E0032) ________________________ Translation: Aligned Final Text Editions of EPPS (ELRA-S0250) Once again if you would like to join ELRA and benefit from its services (that are summarized at www.elra.info), please contact us. Bente Maegaard, President Khalid Choukri, CEO The ELRA Newsletter July - December 2007 - 3 - The UK: an Overview of Some Current Work in HLT Martin Wynne ____________________________________________________________________________________ E-Science and the Human Language aware of and have access to effective The Emerging West Midlands Technologies TM solutions, and are able to exploit their capabilities to the full. NaCTeM While much impressive work in speech The e-Science vision sees beyond a frag- is a major initiative which has emer- and language technologies continues at the mented field of diverse resources and ged in recent years and is the first well-known centres of expertise, some of tools, and isolated researchers, to a world publicly-funded text mining centre in the most interesting new research is also of shared data, interoperable tools and col- the world. NaCTeM is operated by the taking place in less well-known institu- laborative research, underpinned by the University of Manchester with close tions. Two examples are examined here, at next generation of networked computing collaboration with the University of Birmingham City University (BCU) and power. Many researchers and funders in Tokyo. University of Wolverhampton. the UK now see the potential for the lan- guage resources and technologies as part E-Science cuts across subject bounda- Antoinette Renouf is leading several new of the e-Science agenda. ries and organisational structures. projects at the Research and Development Many projects, like those at NaCTeM, Unit for English Studies at Birmingham In a significant recent development, the deploy language tools to aid research in City University (formerly University of UK government’s Office for Science and the physical sciences. Language tech- Central England in Birmingham). An Innovation (OSI) published a report nologies are also being deployed in the investigation into “Repulsion” is exten- ‘Developing the UK’s e-Infrastructure for social sciences, and in the arts and ding work on collocation by analysing cor- Science and Innovation’. This report humanities. pus evidence to look for evidence of a ten- recognises that a national e-infrastructure dency for words not to co-occur. This for research provides a vital foundation The Economic and Social Research could have profound impact on our for the UK’s science base, supporting not Council e-Social Science node understanding of the creation of meaning only rapidly advancing technological ‘Understanding New Forms of Digital and style in language, and serve as a tool to developments, but also the increasing Records for e-Social Science’, in colla- identify errors and evaluate suggested possibilities for knowledge transfer and boration with the School of English choices in drafts by writers of text and the creation of wealth. While we are cur- Studies at the University of international users of English. rently a long way away from constructing Nottingham has recently completed a such an infrastructure for the language project to explore language in relation Work at BCU also continues on the technologies, UK researchers are playing to gestures captured in multi-modal WebCorp Linguist’s Search Engine, a leading roles in international develop- corpora. large-scale specialist search engine which ments. is being integrated with a range of langua- The Arts and Humanities e-Science ge-analysis and output-formatting tools. The CLARIN project is aiming to build a Support Centre has conducted an e- Linguists, language engineers, teachers pan-European infrastructure to support the Science Scoping Study, and one of the and students are increasingly trying to use creation and use of