Chinese Treebank Release Announcement

The Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) is pleased to announce the
PRELIMINARY release of the Chinese Treebank Corpus.  The Chinese Penn
Treebank Project started in Summer 1998 with the goal to create a
100,000 word corpus of Chinese with syntactic bracketing. This is a
preliminary FTP publication containing the Chinese Penn Treebank
Project Corpus. There will be a second release by the end of the
summer, after a third pass of the data by the University of
Pennsylvania annotators, as an additional check on the data. There are
also SGML tags in this corpus that may not SMGL-parse correctly.

  STRUCTURE OF THE DATA:

Size:	  about 100K words, 4185 sentences, 325 data files
Source:	  325 articles from Xinhua newswire between 1994 and 1998
Coding:	  GB code
Format:	  same as the English Penn Treebank except that we keep the original 
	  file information such as "DOCNO" and "DATE" in the data file.
	  To remove them, just type UNIX shell command:	 
	     grep -v "<" filename > new-file
 
Annotation: all the files are annotated at least twice, 
         the 1st-pass is done by one annotator, 
         and the resulting files are checked by the second annotator 
	 (2nd-pass).

SGML:	 An attempt to validate the SGML tags using nsgmls and chtb.dtd was not
	 completed. There are instances of missing and unbalanced tagging.
         

This preliminary FTP publication contains the Chinese Penn Treebank Project
Corpus, produced by:

Principal Investigators: 
    Martha Palmer, Mitch Marcus, Tony Kroch 

Consultants: 
    Martha Palmer, Mitch Marcus, 
    Tony Kroch, Shizhe Huang, 
    Mary Ellen Okurowski, John Kovarik, Boyan A. Onyshkevyc 

Project Managers and Guideline Designers: 
    Fei Xia, Nianwen Xue 

Annotators: 
    Fu-Dong Chiou, Nianwen Xue 

Programming support: 
    Zhibiao Wu

Institutions that have membership in the LDC during the 2000
Membership Year will be able to receive this corpus free of charge.
Nonmembers may purchase the Chinese Treebank Corpus for $100.

If you would like to order a copy of this corpus, please email your
request to <ldc@ldc.upenn.edu>. If you need additional information
before placing your order, or would like to inquire about membership
in the LDC, please send email or call (215) 573-1275.