THE CONSORTIUM FOR LEXICAL RESEARCH 
Y. Wilks, Principal Investigator 
Computing Research Laboratory 
New Mexico State University 
Las Cruces, New Mexico 88003 
PROJECT GOALS 
The Consortium for Lexical Research (CLR), estab- 
lished by the Association for Computational Linguis- 
tics, with funding from DARPA, is now beginning its 
third year. The Consortium is sited at the Computing 
Research Laboratory, New Mexico, USA, under its Di- 
rector, Yorick Wilks, Associate Director Louise Guthrie, 
and an ACL advisory committee consisting of Roy Byrd, 
Ralph Grishman, Mark Liberman and Don Walker. 
The objective of the Consortium for Lexical Research 
is to act as a clearinghouse, in the US and internation- 
ally, for lexical data and software. It shares lexical data 
and tools used to perform research on natural language 
dictionaries and lexicons, as well as communicating the 
results of that research, thus accelerating the scale and 
speed of the development of natural language under- 
standing programs via standard lexicons and software. 
The task of the CLR is primarily to facilitate research, 
making available to the whole natural language process- 
ing community certain resources now held only by a few 
groups that have special relationships with companies or 
dictionary publishers. The CLR, as far as is practical, 
accepts contributions from any source, regardless of the- 
oretical orientation, and makes them available as widely 
as possible for research. 
RECENT RESULTS 
Our focus this year has been on the acquisition of new 
materials and the recruiting of new members. Response 
to the Consortium has been enthusiastic and continuous. 
The repository has grown significantly and the consor- 
tium membership has quadrupled in the last year. Infor- 
mation about the CLR including the catalog of offerings, 
the membership or provider agreements or any previous 
newsletter can be obtained from lexical@nmsu.edu. 
Our current status can be summarized as follows: 
Collection A group of public domain resources has been 
obtained and cataloged and acquisitions of software and 
data from publishers and researchers is ongoing. We now 
offer nearly 100 items. 
Contracts Together with our university lawyers, we 
have developed contracts for members and providers. 
Negotiations with dictionary publishers have been diffi- 
cult, but we now have arrangements with Longman and 
Harper-Collins publishers which facilitate the purchase 
of their machine readable dictionaries by members. At 
present the distribution of the dictionaries is still in the 
hands of the publishers and is slow. We are working on 
ways to expedite the process. 
Membership We now have 54 members of the CLR: 28 
universities, 20 companies (including Apple, Microsoft 
and Xerox) and 4 government organizations. We have 
had over 2,000 ftp accesses in the last six months from 
more than 20 countries around the world. 
Publicity The Consortium has begun a newsletter 
which is distributed to members and to anyone who 
has requested information about the CLR. The newslet- 
ter highlights a different piece of software or data each 
month, and informs its readers of any new items which 
are available. 
Conferences In December 1992 the Computing Re- 
search Laboratory hosted the second workshop of the 
Consortium for Lexical Research: U.S./European Coop- 
eration. The workshop was sponsored jointly by NSF 
and the European Commission to discuss international 
cooperation of lexical computation. Twenty-five re- 
searchers participated in the workshop. A report is avail- 
able through the Computing Research Laboratory. 
PLANS FOR THE COMING YEAR 
We plan to expand membership and holdings steadily 
over the year, and progress toward our long term goal 
of establishing the Consortium as a self-supporting en- 
tity. We hope to do this by signing agreements with 
other dictionary publishers to make their products avail- 
able through the CLR and by more actively seeking con- 
tributions of software or data from researchers. Our 
membership drive will focus on obtaining more inter- 
national members, and members from the community of 
researchers and language specialists who may not have 
everyday access to the internet. 
404 
