THE CONSORTIUM FOR LEXICAL RESEARCH 
Louise Guthrie, Principal Investigator 
Computing Research Laboratory 
New Mexico State University 
Las Cruces, New Mexico 88003 
PROJECT GOALS 
The Consortium for Lexical Research (CLR), established 
by the Association for Computational Linguistics, with 
funding from DARPA, is now ending its third year. The 
Consortium is sited at the Computing Research Lab- 
oratory, New Mexico, USA, under its Director, Louise 
Guthrie, and an ACL advisory committee consisting of 
Roy Byrd, Ralph Grishman, and Mark Liberman. 
The objective of the Consortium for Lexical Research is 
to act as a clearinghouse, in the US and internationally, 
for lexical data and software. It shares lexical data and 
tools used to perform research on natural language dic- 
tionaries and lexicons, 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. 
RECENT RESULTS 
With a repository of over 275 items, ftp accesses aver- 
aging almost 8,000 per month, and a membership roster 
which includes most of the major natural language pro- 
cessing centers in the U.S., CLR has fulfilled many of the 
goals envisioned at its inception. Our focus this year has 
been on the acquisition of new materials and the recruit- 
ing of new members. Response to the Consortium has 
been enthusiastic and continuous. Information about the 
CLI~, 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 The CLR repository has grown significantly 
in the last year, becoming especially strong in tools for 
linguistic analysis. Our holdings encompass lexicons, 
parsers, morphological analyzers, dictionary tools, and 
a wide variety of other materials. We provide a descrip- 
tive catalog of all major holdings. A group of public 
domain resources has also been obtained and cataloged. 
The acquisition of software and data from publishers and 
researchers is ongoing. 
Contracts Together with our university lawyers, we 
have developed contracts for members and providers. 
Negotiations with dictionary publishers have been slow, 
but we now have arrangements with Longman and 
Harper-Collins publishers to facilitate the purchase of 
their machine readable dictionaries by members. We are 
currently working on contracts with two more dictionary 
publishers, one American and one foriegn. 
Membership We now have 57 members of the CLR: 
30 universities, 19 companies (including Apple, BBN, 
and Xerox) and 8 government organizations. Member- 
ship growth is lead by acquisitions development; as our 
repository becomes more substantial we have witnessed 
a concurrent rise in membership inquiries. 
Publicity The Consortium publishes a newsletter 8 
times a year, which is distributed to it's members and 
to core researchers in lexicography. The current mail- 
ing list has more than 700 individuals and organizations, 
many of whom wrote and requested that their names be 
included. The newsletter highlights topical areas, and 
informs members of new materials. 
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 entity. 
We hope to do this by signing agreements with other 
dictionary publishers to make their products available 
through the CLR and by continuing to solicit contri- 
butions of software or data from researchers. CLR has 
enjoyed a supportive working relationship with the Lin- 
guistic Data Consortium (LDC) since our inception; we 
hope to foster still closer ties which will include joint 
planning and operational activities. We are also seek- 
ing to expand CLR through alliances in Europe. This 
would allow quicker access to our archives for interna- 
tional members and open up important avenues for CLR 
into the acquisition of European resources. 
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