Introduction

Spanish Gigaword Second Edition is a comprehensive archive of newswire text data that has been acquired over several years by LDC. This second edition updates Spanish Gigaword First Edition (LDC2006T12) and adds data collected from January 1, 2006 through December 31, 2008.

The three distinct international sources of Spanish newswire in this edition, and the time spans of collection covered for each, are as follows:

• Agence France-Presse, Spanish Service (afp_spa) May 1994 - Dec 2008
• Associated Press Worldstream, Spanish (apw_spa) Nov 1993 - Dec 2008
• Xinhua News Agency, Spanish Service (xin_spa) Sep 2001 - Dec 2008

The seven-letter codes in the parentheses above include the three-character source name abbreviations and the three-character language code ("spa") separated by an underscore ("_") character. The three-letter language code conforms to LDC's internal convention based on the ISO 639-3 standard. These codes are used in the directory names where the data files are found and in the prefix that appears at the beginning of every data file name. They are also used (in all UPPER CASE) as the initial portion of the DOC "id" strings that uniquely identify each news story.

Data

The overall totals for each source are summarized below. Note that the "Totl-MB" numbers show the amount of data obtained when the files are uncompressed (i.e. approximately 7 gigabytes, total); the "Gzip-MB" column shows totals for compressed file sizes as stored on the DVD-ROM; the "K-wrds" numbers are simply the number of whitespace-separated tokens (of all types) after all SGML tags are eliminated.

The following tables present "Text-MB", "K-wrds" and "#DOCS" broken down by source and DOC type; "Text-MB" represents the total number of characters (including whitespace) after SGML tags are eliminated.

Samples

Portions © 1994-2008 Agence France Presse, © 1993-2008 The Associated Press, © 2001-2008 Xinhua News Agency, © 2006, 2009 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania