The Consortium for Lexical Research

Due to a lack of continued funding, the Consortium for Lexical Research (CLR) is unable to accept new memberships or additions to its archive. However, the current archive remains available and, as of December 1, 1995, all data and programs in the members-only directories that do not have special contractual restrictions are now available to everyone. Use of these programs and data remains subject to the restrictions imposed by their owners. Thank you for your continued interest in the Consortium for Lexical Research

Important Notice

Since its inception in 1991, CLR acted as a clearinghouse for sharable natural language processing resources. Funding for CLR was provided largely by the federal government through ARPA ( Advanced Research Projects Agency) and partially through the annual dues of members.

Unfortunately, ARPA was not able to continue funding the Consortium project. Although member support was strong, CLR was not self-sufficient to the point where the project could be administered solely through members fees. As a result, CLR suspended its operations as of September 9th, 1994.

The current collection will be maintained and made available. Both the ftp site and the WWW site remain in operation, and are accessible to members through their passwords.

If you are interested in obtaining an electronic dictionary, please get the document entitled "dictionaries.info" from the CLR ftp site, or read the document "Ordering Dictionaries" from the WWW site. You can still obtain a copy of the CLR catalog of available materials via ftp or the WWW.

CLR was an early advocate of the concept of sharable resources, and made considerable contributions in both promoting re-usability and in providing sharable software and data. CLR regrets having to suspend these services to the NLP community. Please contact Jim Cowie jcowie@crl.nmsu.edu with any questions about CLR.

What is the Consortium for Lexical Research

The Consortium for Lexical Research (CLR) was designed to serve as a repository for software and resources of importance to the natural language processing research community. Sharable resources, and the task of centralizing lexical data and tools, are of foremost concern in lexical research and computational linquistics. It was CLR's objective to help alleviate the repeated re-creation of basic software tools and to assist in making essential data sources more generally available.

How To Get More Information About CLR.

The file 00README.whatis.clr contains a description of CLR activities and goals. At the CLR ftp site, the newsletter/ directory contains past issues of newsletters.

FTP Site Archive Information

What does CLR house at this FTP site

The easiest way to become familiar with CLR is to retrieve the catalog. You can do this directly from Mosaic at the CRL Home Page. Or you can do it through ftp. At the ftp site you can get the file catalog.ps for a postscript version, or catalog for a simple ascii version.

The catalog lists holdings alphabetically and has a paragraph long description of each item. After the paragraph description the catalog tells how to find additional information for that item in an info file. For example: More Info:info/ACRONYM is the info file for the Acronym Dictionary. To obtain the info files from the ftp site, change to the info directory and get the file ACRONYM.

FTP ACCESS

FTP Compression Conventions

Files with the suffix .Z are compressed with Unix compress. Those with the suffix .z or .gz are compressed with GNU gzip. Gzip compresses better.

This ftp server allows file conversions and transfer of directories in the following manner:

Original        Requested
File Name       Name            Result
------------------------------------------------------------------

File.Z         File           File is decompressed before sending
File           File.Z         File is compressed
DIR            DIR.tar        Directory DIR is tar'ed
DIR            DIR.tar.gz     Directory DIR is tar'ed and gzip'ed