S.Sharoff@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@ldc.upenn.edu 3600 Market St., Suite 810
University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104
http://www.ldc.upenn.edu
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