LINGUIST List 6.488

Sun 02 Apr 1995

FYI: Ass. for the History of Lg on WWW, New Corpus, GASLA 95

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Nick "Minoan Genius" Nicholas, FYI: AHL WWW home page
2. alan harris, 8.0399 New Corpus Available from LDC (1/69) (fwd)
3. , GASLA 95 information available on WWW

The Association for the History of Language (formerly the Melbourne
Association for the History of Language) now has a Home Page on the
World Wide Web at:

(http://adhocalypse.arts.unimelb.edu.au/Dept/Linguistics/nsn/Work/ahl.html)

This page includes a table of contents for the association's journal,
_Dhumbadji!_, as well as HTML versions of two articles published in the
journal.

 --
**** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** ****
* Nick Nicholas, Linguistics, University of Melbourne, Australia *
 nsnspeech.language.unimelb.edu.au & nick_nicholasmuwayf.unimelb.edu.au
* (http://adhocalypse.arts.unimelb.edu.au/Dept/Linguistics/nsn/nick.html)*
 "Eschewing obfuscatory verbosity of locutional rendering, the
* circumscriptional appelations are excised." --- W. Mann & S. Thompson, *
 _Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Theory of Text Organisation_, 1987.
**** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** ****

 ===============================================================
 Alan C. Harris, Ph. D. TELNOS: main off: 818-885-2853
 Professor, Communication/Linguistics direct off: 818-885-2874
 Speech Communication Department
 California State University, Northridge home: 818-366-3165
 SPCH CSUN FAX: 818-885-2663
 Northridge, CA 91330-8257 Internet email: AHARRISHUEY.CSUN.EDU
 ===============================================================

 ---------- Forwarded message ----------
 Date: Wed, 22 Mar 1995 00:52:17 EST
 From: Elaine Brennan (EDITORSBROWNVM.BROWN.EDU)
 To: Multiple recipients of list HUMANIST (HUMANISTBROWNVM.BROWN.EDU)
 Subject: 8.0399 New Corpus Available from LDC (1/69)

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 8, No. 0399. Wednesday, 22 Mar 1995.

 Date: Mon, 20 Mar 1995 18:03:48 EST
 From: LDC Office (ldcpine.ling.upenn.edu)
 Subject: New Corpus from LDC

 Announcing

 A New Corpus from
 the Linguistic Data Consortium

 1994 Benchmark Speech Test Collection for the
 ARPA Continuous Speech Recognition Program
 (CSR-III Speech)

The third ARPA Continuous Speech Recognition (CSR) Benchmark Speech Test
Collection is a three CD-ROM set that contains complete development test
and evaluation test suites for speaker-independent, large-vocabulary
speech recognition systems.

The development and evaluation tests share a common structure,
consisting of two core test components ("hubs") and seven specialized
test components ("spokes"). The hub tests, which were mandatory for all
ARPA CSR participants in the November '94 evaluations, provide a base-
line for ASR performance, while the spokes provide the means for
assessing the impact of particular speaking conditions or processing
strategies in relation to baseline performance. Participants were
free to take any combination of spoke tests according to their
research interests). Taken together, the collection encompasses 180
speakers, each producing twenty to forty sentences. These are organized
into two complete development test sets and one evaluation set.

The collection also includes complete documentation on the test
specifications, data collection procedures, transcriptions, and
scoring protocols, together with the latest available version of NIST
software for scoring ASR results and managing SPHERE waveform files.
All speech data is accompanied by both the prompting texts and the
detailed orthographic transcriptions of the utterances.

This was the first ARPA CSR Benchmark Test in which prompting texts
were drawn from a variety of news sources. Whereas earlier
benchmarks were based on Wall Street Journal excerpts (from the
period 1987-89), CSR-III prompts come a variety of North American
Business News Services: Reuters News Service, New York Times, Wahington
Post and Los Angeles Times as well as WSJ; all texts are drawn from
financial news articles written during the period of April through June,
1994. (NAB stands for "North American Business", in contrast to earlier
benchmarks and training collections labeled "WSJ".)

An important companion to the 1994 Benchmark Speech data collection is the
4-disk CSR-III Text Collection, which includes the ARPA CSR 1994
Standard Language Model. The collection comprises both source text data
(prepared by LDC and BBN) and derived statistical tables (compiled by CMU)
of unigram, bigram and trigram word frequencies. The sources include
all available WSJ texts, spanning 1987 through March 1994, and all AP and
San Jose Mercury news data from the three TIPSTER volumes. (Some of the
WSJ data, from 1992 through 1994, appears here for research use for the first
time.) This corpus is also available from the LDC as a 1995 release.

Because of restrictions imposed by the copyright holders of much of the NAB
text, both the speech and text collections are available to LDC members only.
For more information on how to join, send email to ldcunagi.cis.upenn.edu.

Information on other LDC databases is available via anonymous ftp, including
a complete catalog, details on corpora, membership and other licensing forms,
and some samples of data. Connect to ftp.cis.upenn.edu, login as anonymous,
give your email address as password, and go to directory pub/ldc.

The LDC's WWW Home Page holds the LDC catalog and all "readme" files from
each of the corpora released. It can be accessed at URL

 ftp://ftp.cis.upenn.edu/pub/ldc_www/hpage.html

GASLA 95 Information available on WWW

The conference information for Generative Approaches to
Second Language Acquisition (GASLA) 95 is now available
through the World Wide Web. To get the conference
information through our WWW server, please follow the
following instructions.

1. Get to the WWW server at the CUNY Graduate Center by
 Lynx or Mosaic. The URL is "http://www.gc.cuny.edu";.

2. From the CUNY GC home page, choose "School
 Information".

3. From the "School Information" page, choose "Doctoral
 Programs".

4. From the "Doctoral Programs" page, choose
 "Linguistics".

5. From the "Program in Linguistics" home page, choose
 "GASLA 95".

Alternatively, you can directly enter the GASLA 95 home
page, using the URL "http://wwwuser.gc.cuny.edu/thn/g0.htm";.
Please note that the symbol following "g" in "g0.htm" is the
number zero and not capital "O".

For more information or assistance, please contact us at
"gaslaqcvaxa.acc.qc.edu".

Takaaki Hashimoto
For GASLA organizers