Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC)
Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) is a key resource for discovering text corpora, and 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
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
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
- Dictionary of Old English Corpus The Dictionary of Old English electronic corpus is a complete record of surviving Old English except for some variant manuscripts of individual texts. A catalogue of the texts included in our corpus is available in Angus Cameron's "A List of Old English Texts" in A Plan for the Dictionary of Old English, ed. R. Frank and A. Cameron (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), pp. 25-306, with additions. The full bibliographic information of each text is included with the text.
Multilingual Corpora
- Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) AILLA is a digital language archive of recordings, texts, and other multimedia materials in and about the indigenous languages of Latin America. AILLA's mission is to preserve these materials and make them available to Indigenous Peoples, researchers, and other friends of these languages now and for generations to come.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
- 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.