Xinhua News Agency
Availability: CD-ROM
Data type: Text
Text type: Journalistic (newswire)
Domain(s): International News
Language: Mandarin Chinese
General Description:
The xinhua/ directory contains newswire articles from the Xinhua News
Agency, the official newswire service of the government of the People's
Republic of China. The data is collected via telephone/modem at the
Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC).
Publisher and place of publication: Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, China
Collector of Data: Linguistic Data Consortium
Collection time span: 1994-1996
Description of file organization: three files per month.
For example, xh9602_2 contains Xinhua newswire service ("xh") articles from
the second part of February 1996 (Feb. 11-19). Exception: xh96_567
contains all articles from 96/5/6 to 96/7/18. There may also be some
mixing and overlap among the other files due to reception problems.
Number of files: 60
Total size: 62 megabytes;
about 25 million text characters (2.5% ASCII, 97.5% GB-encoded 16-bit)
Tagging description:
The format uses a labeled bracketing, expressed in the style of SGML
(Standard Generalized Markup Language). Each article is enclosed in
... markers, and the main content of the article should be
enclosed in ..., with apparent paragraph and sentence
boundaries marked by ...
and ..., respectively.
There are also several header fields:
DOCNO article ID string
DATE date and time of article
HEADER miscellaneous identifiers; appear in some articles after 95/10
As the beginning of the TEXT section, this should be a
headline. However, this label occasionally occurs in the
middle of the text, where it probably indicates a
subheading or a list item.
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.
Contact for questions or to report errors: ldc@ldc.upenn.edu