Subject Guides: Linguistics: Linguistic Corpora

Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC)

Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) is a key resource for discovering text corpora. To find and access a dataset, follow the instructions on the LDC page linked above. If you require additional assistance, please email: libldc@ualberta.ca.

BYU English Corpora

English Corpora This link opens in a new window
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Select corpora available from BYU Corpora (English Corpora) include:

Corpus of Canadian English (Strathy)
Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)
The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA)
Coronavirus Corpus
British National Corpus (BNC)

Other ways to access the BNC:
Full BNC (in XML) can be downloaded from the Oxford Text Archive
Explore the corpus online via BNCWeb (hosted by Lancaster University), registration required
Available on disc from the University of Alberta Library

Additional English language corpora

Voices of the International Corpus of English (VOICE) - Canada
American National Corpus (ANC)
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Manually Annotated Sub-Corpus (MASC)
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Dictionary of Old English Corpus This link opens in a new window
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Multilingual Corpora

Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA)
The Language Archive The Language Archive provides access to archival resources at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, including: - The MPI for Psycholinguistics Archive; archived resources from the research conducted at the various departments and research groups of the MPI for Psycholinguistics. - Data from researchers working on a wide range of languages throughout the world, including the DOBES archive, much of which is inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World register.
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The archive contains various types of materials, including: audio and video language corpus data from languages around the world; photographs, notes, experimental data, and other relevant information required to document and describe languages and how people use them; records of speech in everyday interactions in families and communities; naturalistic data from adult conversations from endangered and under-studied languages, and linguistic phenomena; experimental stimuli and data.
Rutgers Optimality Archive The Rutgers Optimality Archive is a distribution point for research in Optimality Theory and its conceptual affiliates. Posting in ROA is open to all who wish to disseminate their work in OT and related theories of grammar.
Research Centre on Multilingualism
Natural language software registry
Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) OLAC is an international partnership of institutions and individuals who are creating a worldwide virtual library of language resources by: (i) developing consensus on best current practice for the digital archiving of language resources, and (ii) developing a network of interoperating repositories and services for housing and accessing such resources.

About the LDC

The Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) is an open consortium of various research organizations, and is hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, which creates, collects and distributes speech and text databases, lexicons, and other resources for research and development purposes.

The LDC Catalog includes:

Hundreds of corpora of language data
Indexed collections of Arabic, Chinese and English newswire text
Millions of words of English telephone speech from the Switchboard and Fisher collection

The University of Alberta is an institutional member of the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC). All language corpora listed in the LDC Catalog are available on request.

Linguistic Corpora

Linguistic Corpora are a collection of linguistic data, comprising of speech and text databases, lexicons, text corpora and other metadata-added textual resources used for language and linguistic research.

Some text corpora uses:

Publishing: Dictionaries, grammar books, teaching materials, thesauri. Publishers refer to the use they make of corpus facilities: it's important to know how well their corpora are planned and constructed.
Linguistic Research: Raw data for studying lexis, syntax, morphology, semantics, discourse analysis, stylistics, sociolinguistics, etc.
Artificial Intelligence: Data test bed for program development.
Natural language: Processing Taggers, parsers, natural language understanding programs, spell checking word lists, etc.
Language Teaching: Syllabus and materials design, classroom reference, independent learner research.