Newsgroups: uk.misc,alt.etext
From: dominic@natcorp.ox.ac.uk (Dominic Dunlop)
Subject: Written-to-be-spoken material needed for British national Corpus
Message-ID: <1993Nov2.102827.7917@onionsnatcorp.ox.ac.uk>
Organization: British National Corpus, Oxford University, GB
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1993 10:28:27 GMT
Lines: 39

Examining the various quotas for particular text types that we have to
fill for the British National Corpus, we find that, despite exploring
obvious avenues like broadcasts and published plays, the ``written to
be spoken'' bucket is nowhere near full.  So, if you have a play, a
script (even scripts for cold-calling double-glazing salespeople will
do), or perhaps a sermon, ideally already in electronic form; if you
have some connection with Britain (you were born here, or you'd lived
here for a couple of years immediately before writing the thing); and
if you're willing to let us have indefinite rights for non-exclusive
academic use of the smaller of 90% of the work or 45,000 words, at
least for the European Community, and ideally for a larger territory,
then please get in touch.

A bit of background:

The British National Corpus is a major collaborative research project
involving government, industry and the research community. Its
objective is the creation and distribution of a 100 million-word
computerised corpus of modern English text, for use in linguistic
research.  The participants in the project are Oxford University
Press, which leads the consortium, W R Chambers Ltd, Longman Group UK
Ltd, the British Library and the Universities of Oxford (Oxford
University Computing Services) and Lancaster (the Unit for Computer
Research on the English Language).  Government funding for the project
is provided under the Advanced Technology Programme, which is a
component of the DTI/SERC Joint Framework for Information Technology
(JFIT). The project, which started in January 1991, is planned to run
for 39 months.

The primary goal of the project is to provide the research and
UK industrial community with state-of-the-art corpus and lexical
resources, as a solid basis for the development and exploitation of
new products in the rapidly expanding field of natural language
processing (NLP) as applied to British English. These resources will
be made widely available under appropriate licensing conditions and at
minimum cost to the academic research community and also to the wider
industrial research community.
-- 
Dominic Dunlop