The Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) has created various annotated linguistic data for a variety of common task evaluation programs and projects to create shared linguistic resources. The majority of these annotated linguistic data were created with highly customized annotation tools developed at LDC. The Annotation Graph Toolkit (AGTK) has been used as a primary infrastructure for annotation t...

The current study investigated first language (L1) effects on listener judgment of comprehensibility and accentedness in second language (L2) speech. The participants were 45 university-level adult speakers of English from three L1 backgrounds (Chinese, Hindi, Farsi), performing a picture narrative task. Ten native English listeners used continuous sliding scales to evaluate the speakers’ audio...

Language acquisition maps linguistic experience, primary linguistic data (PLD), onto linguistic knowledge, a grammar. Classically, computational models of language acquisition assume a single target grammar and one PLD source, the central question being whether the target grammar can be acquired from the PLD. However, real-world learners confront populations with variation, i.e., multiple targe...

In this paper we present IDEAL+, a parsing architecture for Italian, which pursues the goal of pairing robustness with deep linguistic analysis by extending a shallow processing kernel with a pool of hybrid constraints for the incremental identification of grammatical relations. The parsing output takes the form of dependency structures representing the full range of instantiated functional rel...

This paper reports on the development and evaluation of an Italian broadcast news corpus at ITC-irst, under a contract with the European Language resources Distribution Agency (ELDA). The corpus consists of 30 hours of recordings transcribed and annotated with conventions similar to those adopted by the Linguistic Data Consortium for the DARPA HUB-4 corpora. The corpus will be completed and rel...

This presentation reports on recent progress the Linguistic Data Consortium has made in addressing the needs of multiple research communities by collecting, annotating and distributing, simplifying access and developing standards and tools. Specifically, it describes new trends in publication, a sample of recent projects and significant improvements to LDC Online that improve access to LDC data...

This paper describes the collection of the H1 Corpus of children’s weekly writing over the course of 3 months in 2nd and 3rd grades, aged 7-11. The texts were collected within the normal classroom setting by the teacher. Texts of children whose parents signed the permission to donate the texts to science were collected and transcribed. The corpus consists of the elicitation techniques, an overv...

It is claimed that bilingual children have two separate linguistic systems from early ages. Over the past decades, linguists carried out a number of studies to test the validity of the claim. They explored bilingual children’s code-mixing in correlation with a variety of linguistic elements, such as lexicon, syntax, phonology in different contexts, concluding that bilingual children had separat...

On the Linguistic Data Consortium’s (LDC) 20th anniversary, this paper describes the changes to the language resource landscape over the past two decades, how LDC has adjusted its practice to adapt to them and how the business model continues to grow. Specifically, we will discuss LDC’s evolving roles and changes in the sizes and types of LDC language resources (LR) as well as the data they inc...

This paper describes the Unisys MUC-3 text understanding system, a system based upon a three tiered approach to text processing in which a powerful knowledge-based form of information retrieval plays a central role . This knowledge-based form of information retrieval makes it possible to define a n effective level of text analysis that falls somewhere between what is possible with standard keyw...