Trends in HLT Research: A Survey of LDC’s Data Scholarship Program

Trends in HLT Research: A Survey of LDC’s Data Scholarship Program Denise DiPersio, Christopher Cieri Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania 3600 Market Street, Suite 810, Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA E-mail: dipersio@ldc.upenn.edu, ccieri@ldc.upenn.edu Abstract Since its inception in 2010, the Linguistic Data Consortium’s data scholarship program has awarded no cost grants in data to 64 recipients from 24 countries. A survey of the twelve cycles to date – two awards each in the Fall and Spring semesters from Fall 2010 through Spring 2016 – yields an interesting view into graduate program research trends in human language technology and related fields and the particular data sets deemed important to support that research. The survey also reveals regions in which such activity appears to be on a rise, including in Arabic-speaking regions and portions of the Americas. Keywords: language resources, data, graduate studies, human language technology 1. Introduction The Linguistic Data Consortium’s (LDC) Data Scholarship program 1 was established in 2010 and formalized the Consortium’s long-standing principle that no one with a bona fide research agenda and a genuine inability to contribute should go without data. Before the grant program, LDC routinely handled requests from (principally) graduate students who needed particular data sets for their thesis or dissertation work and whose institutions lacked the financial resources to acquire them. The Consortium developed a formal program subsidized by its members so that, consistent with LDC’s mission, all in the community would have an opportunity to seek such assistance. The requirements are not onerous. Applicants must submit a data use statement that describes the research plan, use of data and method for determining success as well as a letter of support from their advisor that includes information about the probability of success and asserts inability to contribute. The program is widely advertised on LDC’s web pages, social media platforms, in the monthly newsletter, at conferences and through other LDC networks. Since 2010, 64 recipients from 26 countries have received 110 corpora valued at over USD $175,000. There have been 100 scholarship applicants overall, yielding a success rate of 64%. This paper describes the data scholarship program, its requirements and evaluation criteria, followed by a survey of applicants, requested data sets, research areas, and the countries represented. That quantitative data is then analyzed for signs of research trends and the geographic areas in which the work is being conducted. 2. Data Scholarship Program Details Data scholarships are offered semiannually during the fall and spring semesters and are available to students pursuing undergraduate or graduate studies in an accredited college or university. They are not restricted to any particular field 1 https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/language-resources/data/data- of study but, in keeping with LDC licenses, projects must deal with linguistic aspects of the resources. The application has two components. A Data Use Proposal must include: the name of the database(s) requested, a brief description of the research project, a description of how the data will be used and how success will be measured. The Letter of Support from the applicant’s thesis/dissertation …

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