Corpora: BNC Sampler now available

British National Corpus (natcorp@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk)
Thu, 11 Mar 1999 18:50:21 +0000 (GMT)

[please excuse any cross posting]

**** BNC SAMPLER NOW AVAILABLE ****

I am very pleased to announce that we are now taking orders for copies
of the BNC Sampler, which we expect to start delivering before the end
of March (it is currently being printed). Like all future releases
of the BNC, this is available worldwide.

The BNC Sampler CD contains fully operational versions of four
state-of-the-art text analysis tools together with a 2 million word
balanced corpus of Modern British English, extracted from the British
National Corpus.

The Sampler corpus contains one million words of spoken text and one
million words of written text. In selecting from the BNC, we tried to
preserve the variety of text-types represented, so the Sampler
includes in its 184 texts many different genres of writing and modes of
speech. Full bibliography and documentation is included on the CD, of
course. The corpus is in the same SGML format as the original BNC.

The part of speech annotation applied to the corpus has been
thoroughly revised and checked at the University of Lancaster, using a
more delicate tagset. Some inconsistencies and errors in the text
headers have also been corrected.

The corpus can be processed using any SGML-aware software. A number of
leading software developers have generously contributed fully
functional versions of their products for inclusion with the CD. The
following tools are included:

* Corpus Work Bench (from Arne Fitschen, IMS Stuttgart)

* Qwick, a Java application (from Oliver Mason, University of Birmingham)

* SARA, (the SGML-Aware Retrieval Application developed at Oxford)

* WordSmith Tools (from Mike Scott at Liverpool University)

All of these tools except CWB are designed for 32-bit Windows systems
(i.e. Windows 95, 98, or NT). WordSmith is the only one which will
also run on Windows 3. Qwick has been tested using the Java runtimes
for Solaris and Macintosh as well. CWB is for use in a UNIX
environment; runtimes for Solaris and Linux are provided.

The software included on the CD will work only with the texts on the
CD (i.e. you cannot use the software to access other textbases), but
in all others respects these are fully functioning versions.

Between them, these four software packages offer an impressive range
of different features, and embody interestingly different ways of
doing textual or linguistic analysis on marked-up language
corpora. The size of this corpus means that you (and your students)
can now experiment with these tools on a realistically sized body of
material using an ordinary office or home PC.

The BNC Sampler is priced at 30 pounds each for up to 10
copies. Orders of 11 or more copies receive a 20% discount.

To order copies of the BNC Sampler, please download an order form from
our web site at http://info.ox.ac.uk/bnc/getting/sampler.html
or return the attached order form
to BNC Sales/HCU
13 Banbury Rd
Oxford OX2 6NN, UK

email: natcorp@oucs.ox.ac.uk fax: +44 1865 273 275

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Name:

Delivery Address:

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Please supply me with ____ copies of the BNC Sampler

at unit cost GBP 30 ______

minus discount 20% ______
plus VAT 17.5% ______

TOTAL COST ______

NB: 20% discount applies to orders of 11 or more copies.
VAT is payable on all orders within Europe
Postage and packing is free for up to 50 copies within Europe;
up to 10 copies elsewhere. Please contact us for details of other rates.

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ALL ORDERS MUST BE PREPAID: WE CANNOT CURRENTLY INVOICE YOU
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Payment may be made by cheque or money order in pounds sterling,
made out to OXFORD UNIVERSITY COMPUTING SERVICES

Payment in US dollars or Euros is also accepted but please add an
additional 5 GBP bank fee. Please convert at the rates current
when you order.

Payment can also be made using your credit card (MasterCard or VISA only) if
you fill out the following details:

Please charge my credit card the total amount _____________

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Expiry Date _________________

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Lou Burnard http://users.ox.ac.uk/~lou
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