The Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese

The Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC) is designed as a Chinese match for the FLOB and FROWN corpora for modern British and American English. The corpus is suitable for use in both monolingual research into modern Mandarin Chinese and cross-linguistic contrast of Chinese and British/American English. The corpus sampled 15 written text categories including news, literary texts, academic prose and official documents etc published in P. R. China in the earlier 1990s for a total of approximately 1 million words. The same sampling frame and period as FLOB/FROWN were used in LCMC. The corpus is marked up for text categories, sample file numbers, paragraphs, sentences and tokens. Linguistic annotations undertaken on the corpus include tokenization and part-of-speech tagging. The whole corpus is annotated at the word level and includes orthographic and morphological annotations. The tagging system used was produced by the Institute of Computing Science Chinese Lexical Analysis System (ICTCLAS), the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The corpus is encoded in Unicode (UTF-8) and marked up in XML. The corpus comes with a User Manual detailing corpus design specifications and part-of-speech tags. The XML structure of the corpus was validated using the parser built in Xaira. Part-of-speech tagging of all aspect markers was manually checked