Corpora@Stanford

Corpora Help Pages
of the Stanford Linguistics Department & CSLI

Welcome to the corpora help pages of the linguistics department at Stanford and CSLI. This page addresses the following critical questions: "Is this site for you?", "What information can I find on these pages?", and "What does this site not provide - no matter how much I look for it?".

Is this site what you were looking for?

This site contains information for corpus users at the linguistics department and CSLI. The "Getting Started" section is focused on corpora newbies. Thus more experienced users (and users familiar with the local setup) should probably head straight to the "Available Resources" section of this site. While this site definitely also contains information that is relevant to experienced users (of corpora), it focuses on giving support for "beginners".

That is, if you want to know how to gather lots of facinating examples for your research, do searches for certain syntactic patterns, or browse speech recordings, etc. but you do not know how to do what or even where .... these pages are an attempt to provide some guidance for the first steps in the big world of corpora. Furthermore, this site can be used as a reference for all of the following topics ...

What information can I find on these pages?

The purpose of this site is to provide information about the following topics:

• Availability of corpora at Stanford
  • Type (e.g. speech corpus vs. corpus of written texts)
  • Language
  • Location (e.g. on AFS, the corpus machine, or on CD)
• Availability of corpus-related tools at Stanford
  • Type (e.g. concordancer, XML-browser, Treebank search engine)
  • Location (e.g. on AFS, the corpus machine, or on CD)
• Availability of help & support for corpus-related work at Stanford
  • Personal assistance: The corpus-TA
  • Available tutorials, manuals, etc.

What this site does NOT provide

This page is not intended to give a complete overview of corpora, their use, corpus-software, and available tutorials on the WWW. If you are interested in the more general picture and pages that are dedicated to the steadily growing collection of neat tools and big electronic corpora on the WWW, please have a look at our small and very subjective link collection - what we consider the Top 10 info-sources "out there".
Neither is this site an attempt to provide sophisticated support for complex computational projects. It is far beyond the scope of the page to do anything but to catalogue the available corpus-related resources at Stanford and to guide the first-time user to be able to access those resources.