People's Daily

Availability:	CD-ROM
Data type:	Text
Text type:	Journalistic (newspaper)
Domain(s):	National, International News
Language:	Mandarin Chinese


General Description:

   The p_daily/ directory contains newspaper articles from the
Beijing-based Renmin Ribao (People's Daily), the largest newspaper
published by the government of the People's Republic of China. The
agreement for research use of the text was reached with the Foreign
Affairs Bureau of Renmin Ribao.

The text archive was made available to the LDC in two phases: the
first delivery, made in 1994, was made on 100+ floppy disks, and the
second, made in 1996, was made on CD-ROM.


Publisher and place of publication: Renmin Ribao (People's Daily)
 Beijing, People's Republic of China


Collector of Data:  Linguistic Data Consortium

Collection time span: 1991-1996

Description of file organization:  one file per month.

Number of files: 72

Total size:  290 megabytes;
 about 125 million text characters (1% ASCII, 99% GB-encoded 16-bit)

Tagging description:

The format uses a labeled bracketing, expressed in the style of SGML
(Standard Generalized Markup Language).  Each article (originally a
separate file) is enclosed in <DOC>...</DOC> markers, and the main content
of the article should be enclosed in <TEXT>...</TEXT>, with apparent
paragraph boundaries marked by <p> or <P>.

Characters are encoded in the "GB" system used in the People's Republic of
China.  To view files conveniently in MULE (Multi-lingual Emacs), you may
want to use a simple shell script like the one provided in the tools/
directory.

The header fields vary somewhat from time to time.  The first file (pd9101)
has only <HL> fields to mark headlines.  The rest of the 1991 material also
includes <DATE> fields in English and <AU> fields for the author.  The 1992
material has these same fields, but the dates are GB-encoded Arabic
numerals with Chinese characters for year/month/date.  From 1993 on, the
dates appear in ASCII Arabic numerals, but the GB Chinese characters for
year/month/day are still used after each number.  (For example, January 12,
1994 appears as "1994<year>01<month>12<day>", where <year> indicates the
Chinese character for "year", etc.)  Finally, the 1994-1995 material uses
longer tags of HEADLINE and AUTHOR, and adds tags of <CAT> and <NUM>.


Contact for questions or to report errors:  ldc@ldc.upenn.edu