The AusNC Project: Plans, Progress and Implications for Language Technology

In the last eighteen months, a consensus has emerged from researchers in various disciplines that a vital piece of research infrastructure is lacking in Australia, namely, a substantial collection of computerised language data. A result of this consensus is an initiative aimed at the establishment of an Australian National Corpus. The progress of this initiative is presented in this paper, along with discussion of some important design issues and a consideration of how the initiative relates to the field of language technology in Australia.