The American National Corpus: A Standardized Resource for American English

Linguistic research has become heavily reliant on text corpora over the past ten years. Such resources are becoming increasingly available through efforts such as the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) in the US and the European Language Resources Association (ELRA) in Europe. However, in the main the corpora that are gathered and distributed through these and other mechanisms consist of texts which can be easily acquired and are available for re-distribution without undue problems of copyright, etc. This practice has resulted in a vast over-representation among available corpora of certain genres, in particular newspaper samples, which comprise the greatest percentage of texts currently available from, for example, the LDC, and which also dominate the training data available for speech recognition purposes. Other available corpora typically consist of technical reports, transcriptions of parliamentary and other proceedings, short telephone conversations, and the like. The upshot of this is that corpusbased natural language processing has relied heavily on language samples representative of usage in a handful of limited and linguistically specialized domains.