W0004 : ECI - European Corpus Initiative

The European Corpus Initiative (ECI) was founded to oversee the acquisition and preparation of a large multilingual corpus, and supports existing and projected national and international efforts to carefully design, collect and publish large-scale multilingual written and spoken corpora. ECI has produced the Multilingual Corpus I (ECI/MCI) of over 98 million words, covering most of the major European languages, as well as Turkish, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, Malay and more. The primary focus in this effort is on textual material of all kinds, including transcriptions of spoken material.

Just a sampling of the contents of the CD-ROM:

• German newspaper texts from the Frankfurter Rundschau from July 1992 -March 1993. provided by Universität Gesamthochschule, Paderborn, Germany. Approximately 34 million words.
• French newspaper texts from Le Monde, consisting of material from September 1989, October 1989, and January 1990. Provided by LIMSI CNRS, France. Approximately 4.1 million words.
• Extracts from the Leiden Corpus of Dutch, consisting of newspapers, transcribed speech, etc. Provided by Institut voor Nederlandse Lexicologie, Leiden, Holland. Approximately 5.5 million words.
• International Labor Organisation (ILO) "Official Bulletin, B Series". Vols LXVII(1984) - LXXII(1989). Parallel texts in English, French and Spanish provided by the International Labor Organisation. Approximately 5 million words.