1) What is LDC Online?

LDC Online contains an indexed collection of Arabic, Chinese and English newswire text, millions of words of English telephone speech from the Switchboard and Fisher collections and the American English Spoken Lexicon, as well as the full text of the Brown corpus. With LDC Online, users can search textual data and play audio extracts for transcribed utterances on standard web browsers.

The main goal of LDC Online is to provide rapid, flexible and convenient search and retrieval of LDC data for linguistic education, research and development.

There are dozens of terabytes of data available at the LDC, and the amount is increasing every year. Very few research sites have adequate disk space to store this data and the necessary indices for searching.

LDC Online does NOT aim to be a substitute for direct on-line access to news and media sources. The nature of the LDC's agreements with data providers forbids this. Instead, the intended use of LDC Online is to facilitate linguistic education, research and development. The amount of context provided on LDC Online will depend upon our agreements with data providers.

2) What is an LDC Online Membership?

Current LDC members already have access to all LDC Online resources. An LDC Online Membership is a reduced cost alternative providing interactive access to a growing subset of LDC data. The LDC Online Membership is available to Non-Profit and U.S. government organizations for $1,000 (USD) per calendar year (January to December).

The LDC Online Membership does not include free corpora from our corpus catalog. Additionally, this membership does not include the benefit of licensing data from closed Membership Years at the Reduced Licensing Fee.

Please consult the Members FAQ for further information on LDC Membership.

3) Can I access all LDC data?

LDC data are copyrighted, and their use is governed by agreements between the University of Pennsylvania (as LDC host institution) and the copyright holders. Where these agreements allow, it is LDC's intent to make the relevant data available via LDC Online.

4) How can I get an LDC Online account?

Anyone can request a Guest account by going here and clicking on the "Click to Create New User" button, even those who are not affiliated with an LDC member organization.

Those who are affiliated with an LDC member organization may request a new user account also by going here and clicking on the "Click to Create New User" button. After this is completed your organization's membership Administrator will be notified of your request for a user account. Once the Administrator confirms your affiliation, you will gain all data rights due to your organization.

5) What about other kinds of searching and processing?

If you have ideas about other kinds of access that you would like to have, or changes in the way search results are now presented, please let us know. Contact us at ldc@ldc.upenn.edu

It is possible that what you want can already be done in some way, or that it is on the list of capabilities that we plan to add. If not, we will consider all suggestions carefully.

Contact ldc@ldc.upenn.edu
Last modified: Monday, 03-Aug-2009 17:23:42 EDT
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