Terms of use

By using the Archive of Pittsburgh Language and Speech (APLS), you agree that you have read and will abide by the following terms of use.1 This document also serves as the license agreement for APLS (save for this documentation site, which is distributed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license).

Definitions used in this document

  • APLS: audio data, transcripts, annotations, metadata, derived data, audio excerpts, transcript excerpts, documentation, and the user interface.
  • APLS data: all of the above except documentation and the user interface
  • audio data: original sound files (in .wav or .mp3 format)
  • transcripts: original transcripts stored in the APLS corpus (in .eaf format)
  • annotations: annotation data stored in the APLS corpus, including both labels and timestamps
  • metadata: participant and transcript attributes stored in the APLS corpus, as well as data about corpus/transcript versions
  • derived data: non-audio data and measurements that can be calculated or generated from audio data, transcripts, annotations, and/or metadata
  • audio excerpts: portions of original sound files
  • transcript excerpts: series of annotations (on at least one annotation layer) corresponding to one or more audio excerpts
  • documentation: the set of webpages at https://djvill.github.io/APLS and the data/code at https://github.com/djvill/APLS that underlies it
  • user interface: the set of webpages accessible to logged-in users at https://apls.pitt.edu/labbcat

  1. APLS is provided for free, public use for research and educational purposes. It may not be used for commercial purposes. It may not be used to create technology designed for policing or law enforcement.

  2. APLS is provided as-is, with no warranty. If you discover inaccuracies in the transcripts, annotations, and/or metadata, please notify us.

  3. If you present or publish research based on APLS, you must cite APLS with one of the recommended citations, including the version number.

  4. If you present or publish research based on APLS, you must send us a copy of the research. Depending on how you used APLS data, we may ask you to contribute back to APLS.

  5. To access the user interface, you must log in with your user account. You may not share your username and password with anyone else. We may grant exceptions to create specialized user accounts for classes, demonstrations, etc.; contact us if you’re interested. We reserve the right to remove user accounts that are inactive or that place excessive demands on computational resources (e.g., repeatedly downloading the full set of audio data), but we will contact users before doing do.

  6. Users may download APLS data, keep it indefinitely, and make copies for the purpose of personal backup or storage. Users may privately share APLS data with individual collaborators for the purpose of research and/or educational collaboration; collaborators are also bound by these terms of use. Users may share annotations, metadata, derived data, transcript excerpts, and/or screenshots of the user interface publicly, so long as they do not permit readers or viewers to reconstruct substantial portions of audio data, transcripts, and/or annotations. Users may not share audio data, audio excerpts, or transcripts publicly. Users may play audio excerpts for research/classroom audiences or as experimental stimuli, but may not share files to wider audiences.

  7. Users may not use web-scraping tools to access APLS data. If you need programmatic tools for accessing APLS data, you may use APIs that LaBB-CAT provides (e.g., via the nzilbb.labbcat R package).

  8. You must respect speakers’ privacy and anonymity. You may not attempt to identify or contact speakers. Some speech is redacted to protect speakers’ privacy and anonymity; you must not attempt to circumvent redactions. If you have concerns about speakers’ anonymity, please notify us.

  9. If these terms of use change, we will notify users and explain any changes. We may grant exceptions to these terms; please contact us if you are interested.

Finally, if anything is unclear about what you can or cannot do with APLS, please do not hesitate to contact us at apls@pitt.edu!

  1. These terms of use were inspired in part by those of:

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