Issues in Corpus Creation and Distribution: The Evolution of the Linguistic Data Consortium

Abstract

The Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) is a non-profit consortium of universities, companies and government research laboratories that supports education, research and technology development in language related disciplines by collecting or creating, distributing and archiving language resources including data and accompanying tools, standards and formats. LDC was founded in 1992 with a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to the University of Pennsylvania as host organization. LDC publication and distribution activities self-support from membership fees and data sales while new data creation is supported primarily by grants from DARPA and the National Science Foundation. Recent developments in the creation and use of language resources demand new roles for international data centers. Since our report at the last Language Resource and Evaluation Conference in Granada in 1998, LDC has observed growth in the demand for language resources along multiple dimensions: larger corpora with more sophisticated annotation in a wider variety of languages are used in an increasing number of language related disciplines. There is also increased demand for reuse of existing corpora. Most significantly, small research groups are taking advantage of advances in microprocessor technology, data storage and internetworking to create their own corpora. This has lead to the birth of new annotation practices whose very variety creates barriers to data sharing. This paper will describe recent LDC efforts to address emerging issues in the creation and distribution of language resources.

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