American National Corpus
The American National Corpus (ANC) is a text corpus of American English containing 22 million words written and spoken data produced since 1990. The ANC may at some point of time include a range of genres comparable to the British National Corpus. It is annotated for part of speech and lemma, shallow parse, and named entities.
The ANC in its current size of 22 million words is available from the Linguistic Data Consortium. A 15 million word subset of the corpus, called the Open American National Corpus (OANC), is freely available with no restrictions on its use from the ANC Website.
The corpus and its annotations are provided according to the specifications of ISO/TC 37 SC4's Linguistic Annotation Framework. By using a freely provided transduction tool, the corpus and user-chosen annotations is provided in multiple formats, including the XML format conformant to the XML Corpus Encoding Standard (XCES) (usable with the British National Corpus's XAIRA search engine), a UIMA-compliant format, and formats suitable for input to a wide variety of concordance software.
The ANC differs from other corpora of English because it is richly annotated, including different part of speech annotations (Penn tags, CLAWS5 and CLAWS7 tags), shallow parse annotations, and annotations for several types of named entities. Additional annotations are added to all or parts of the corpus as they become available, often by contributions from other projects. Unlike on-line searchable corpora, which due to copyright restrictions allow access only to individual sentences, the entire ANC is available to enable research involving, for example, development of statistical language models and full-text linguistic annotation.
ANC annotations are automatically produced and unvalidated. A Manually Annotated Sub-Corpus (MASC) was released which includes validated annotations for the above-mentioned phenomena as well as Penn Treebank syntactic annotation, WordNet sense annotation, and FrameNet semantic frame annotations.
In Fall 2009, the OANC Ngram Search Engine was to become available on the ANC Website, which would provide intra- and inter-sentential pattern-based searches. In early 2010, the OANC was to be expanded to include an additional 20-30 million words of written and spoken data.[needs update]
