European Language Newspaper Text
The Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) announces the availability of a
European language text corpus. This corpus includes roughly 100
million words of French, 90 million words of German and 15 million
words of Portuguese.
The European Language Newspaper Text corpus is composed of news text
that has been marked using SGML. The text is taken from the
following sources:
1) Approximately 60 million words of text in French and German have
been made available from the Associated Press (AP) World Stream. AP
World Stream is a compilation of AP news reports produced in 86
bureaus in 68 countries.
The Associated Press Worldstream newswire service provides articles in
six languages, interleaved on a single data stream. The data is
collected via an Associated Press installed telephone line at the
LDC.
2) Approximately 110 million words of text in French, German and
Portuguese have been made available from Agence France Presse. Each
language was supplied in separate data streams collected via a Dateno
MKII satellite receiver and associated equipment at the LDC.
3) Approximately 20 million words of text in German have been made
available from Deutsche Presse Agentur. The text is collected via an
AP Datafeatures telephone line installed at the Linguistic Data
Consortium.
4) A smaller part of the corpus comes from Le Monde newspaper. The Le
Monde data covers about 65 million words of French. It is quite
distinct from the AP and AFP materials in its markup approach, because
it has been prepared in compliance with the conventions of the Text
Encoding Initiative (TEI), rather than having been based on the model
of the TIPSTER collections, which were originally developed prior to
the establishment of the TEI conventions.
Because of restrictions imposed by the copyright holders of much of
the news text, this corpus is available to 1995 and 1996 LDC members
only. Members who wish to receive this corpus must sign the European
Language News Corpus User agreement. This agreement is available on
the Linguistic Data Consortium WWW Home Page at URL
http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/ldc/catalog/index.html.
If you would like to order a copy of this corpus, please email your
request to ldc@unagi.cis.upenn.edu. If you need additional information
before placing your order, or would like to inquire about membership
in the LDC, please send email or call (215) 898-0464.