Please mail checks to the LDC, but note that they should credit “The Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania”.

For security purposes, please do not provide credit card details by email. It is recommended that you call the LDC at +1 215 573 1275 or use our VISA/MasterCard Information Form.

We do accept institutional Purchase Orders in most instances and can issue a quote or pro-forma invoice if your organization requires it.

7) Will the LDC automatically send each database to which my organization is entitled? ?

Standard Members need to request corpora from LDC as they become available. Notices will be mailed (via email) to all members when new data sets are available. Members should request corpora via email, phone, or fax. Each message should provide a shipping address.

Subscription Members do not need to request corpora. LDC will automatically send every corpus release from their Membership year to the Member as it becomes available. However, if any special licensing agreements are required for an individual corpus, LDC will first send this license to the Member for signature and upon its return will ship the corpus to the Member.

8) What if I need more than one copy of a corpus released in my organization's Membership Year?

Members may license additional copies of corpora released in their Membership Year(s) for the Extra Copy Fee of $150 per CD-ROM, $200 per DVD, or the catalog price if lower. These extra copies are subject to the same restrictions and covered by the same license, if any, as the primary copies. If the data are distributed via web-based download, you may download as many additional copies as needed.

9) What is a Reduced Licensing Fee?

Benefits of being a current LDC member include the ability to license corpora from closed Membership Years at a reduced fee. This benefit is tied to the calendar year and expires if your organization does not renew for the current Membership Year. The Reduced License fee has been set at 50% of the full non-member license fee for an individual corpus or the Extra Copy fee, whichever is greater.

The Reduced Licensing Fee for 'Members Only' corpora is as follows: US$200 per DVD-ROM, US$150 per CD-ROM, and US$100 per web download.

The Reduced Licensing Fee benefit does not apply to organizations who join as LDC Online Members.

10) How do I download corpora from the web-based distribution system?

For many years, the LDC has provided electronic delivery of relatively small corpora (typically, data sets that could be compressed down to 40 megabytes or less) via an FTP mechanism; in recent years, very small corpora (less than 4 MB) have been E-mailed to recipients as MIME attachments.

Although FTP/E-mail delivery worked most of the time for most people, we know there have been numerous problems, affecting both new and experienced users (file-not-found on the ftp server, e-mail account overwhelmed by too much data, security measures at the user's site that blocked ftp access and/ or email attachments, and so on).

To put an end to these problems, and provide more effective access to these corpora, we have switched to a new web-based distribution method, using the LDC's intranet.

The LDC Intranet provides login access to a variety of LDC resources. Anyone can establish a "guest" login account free of charge, and the number of resources available to guest accounts will be increasing. Individuals who have obtained corpora from the LDC, or who are affiliated with organizations that have received LDC corpora, already have a wider range of intranet resources available. Among these is the new "Corpus Download" service, for corpora that are small enough to deliver electronically.

Connecting to the intranet is simple: your "user name" is your email address; if you have forgotten (or never knew) your password, there is a link on the login page to reset your password: if your email address is on record, a new password will be sent to you. (If your email address is not on record but you have received data from LDC in the past, please send email to ldc@ldc.upenn.edu for assistance. If you are a first-time user, simply create a new user account, and refer to the paragraph about "guest" accounts below.)

Once you are logged in, you'll see a page containing links to the intranet resources available to you. If your user account is affiliated with an organization that has received any of the smaller corpora from the LDC (or if you personally have received such corpora from the LDC), one of the links you'll find is "Corpora Available for Download".

When you follow this link, you'll see a complete list of all corpora that have ever been requested by / delivered to you or your organization and are small enough for electronic transfer. The listing shows the LDC Catalog ID and Name for the corpus, the date of the LDC invoice that licensed that corpus to your organization, the number of times and most recent date (if any) that the corpus was downloaded over the web, and a button to start downloading the corpus. (The Catalog ID string is a link to the LDC's web catalog page describing the corpus.)

You and other recognized members of your organization may download any corpus listed on this page, whenever and as often as you see fit.

SPECIAL NOTE ABOUT GUEST ACCOUNTS:

Whenever someone uses the LDC intranet login page to create a new user account, they are asked to identify an organization that they belong to. The organization could be "Guest", meaning the new user will not be affiliated with any organization that has ever done business with the LDC.

But if the new user cites an organization that is already in our records, a notification will be sent to one or more known points of contact (POC) at that organization, informing them that a new LDC intranet account has been opened by someone asserting to be affiliated with them; the POC must then use his or her own LDC intranet login account to review the information about the new user, and either authorize or reject the affiliation. Once the POC authorizes the new user as a recognized member of the organization, that user will have access to the Corpus Download page (as well as all other intranet resources available to the organization).

Any individual who obtains corpora from the LDC (whether privately or on behalf of an organization) will automatically be set up with an intranet user account that supports access to the Corpus Download page -- this is a side-effect of the LDC's invoicing process, which includes the recipients acceptance of the necessary license agreement(s) for the corpora.

11) How do I cite LDC corpora in a bibliography?

Although there is no one standard format for citing electronic resources, LDC suggests the following format based on MLA Style guidelines.

Examples:

Liberman, Mark, et al. Emotional Prosody Speech and Transcripts LDC2002S28. CD-
    ROM. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, 2002.

Huang, Shudong, David Graff and George Doddington. Multiple-Translation Chinese
    Corpus LDC2002T01. FTP FILE. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, 2002.

General Information

For inquiries e-mail ldc@ldc.upenn.edu.

Please send payment and a signed user agreement to the following address:

Surface mail:

Linguistic Data Consortium

3600 Market Street, Suite 810

University of Pennsylvania

Philadelphia, PA, 19104-2653, USA.

Specific questions should be addressed to member-service@ldc.upenn.edu.