[Corpora-List] Web corpora vs. Gigaword

[David Graff]

S.Sharoff at leeds.ac.uk said:
> ... (LDC corpora are prohibitively expensive) ...

With apologies for my nit-picking, I would consider "prohibitively" to be a
bit too strong.  Certainly, US$2000 for a one-year academic membership in
the LDC is a lot of money -- especially so back in 1992 when that amount
was first established -- and even now, regretfully, we know that many
non-profit institutions have trouble coming up with this kind of money.
(The LDC does provide reduced rates for those with special needs and
insufficient funds, considered on a case-by-case basis.)

In any case, even in the current era of "unlimited" web access, the expense
involved (counting equipment, infrastructure, labor and so on) to create
just a fraction of the resources that the LDC releases to members in any
given year makes the $2000 academic membership fee anything but
"prohibitive".

In fact, for those who want to use data that is owned and copyrighted by
commercial information providers, $2000 is remarkably cheap compared to
what it might cost to deal directly with all the copyright owners.

-----------
David Graff			Linguistic Data Consortium
graff at ldc.upenn.edu		3600 Market St., Suite 810
University of Pennsylvania	Philadelphia, PA 19104
		http://www.ldc.upenn.edu