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Licences for corpora

FID Linguistik grants licences for individual corpora to researchers within Germany. With the financial support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), the FID offers corpora provided by the European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

For the researchers the service is free of charge.

Conditions for the granting of a corpus licence

  • Corpus licences are granted only to researchers (e.g., professor, lecturer, assistant) who are affiliated to an academic institution in Germany, i.e. a university or a university-independent research centre.
  • The provided corpus has to be used for the exploration of a linguistically relevant research question.
  • The provided corpus has to be used only for research purposes in a non-for-profit academic environment (Terms of use).

Available corpora

Here you will find the up-to-date list of the available corpora.

By selecting a corpus from the list, you will be redirected to a web form with which you can request a licence.

In February 2022, we expanded the offer so that the list includes currently more than 300 mono- and multilingual text corpora.

  • Funding

    The granting of corpus licences is a pilot project of FID Linguistik. The goal is to help linguists working in Germany gain access to commercial language resources. The provided licence allows download of the corpus and language engineering research activities.

    In cooperation with ELRA, a leading provider of multilingual corpora, the FID developed a licensing model based on a pay-per-use principle. Currently, the FID is testing this model on selected written corpora from the ELRA catalogue.

    With the financial support of the DFG, a special fund for corpus licence fees has been established. The FID manages the fund, processes the corpus requests and mediates between the end-users and the corpus provider.

  • Procedure
    1. Select a resource from the list of the available corpora and send a request to FID Linguistik.
    2. The FID will examine the request. It will check your academic affiliation as well as the linguistic motivation of the research.
    3. The FID will inform you timely about the decision (approval or rejection).
    4. If approved, the request will be forwarded to ELRA.
    5. ELRA will contact you. Upon signing of the End-User Agreement, ELRA will deliver the access details directly to you.
    6. Download the corpus directly from the ELRA server.
    7. After a successful download, FID Linguistik will pay the licence fee.

  • General terms
    • FID Linguistik processes the requests in the order of their receipt. Annually, only one request per person can be accepted.
    • FID Linguistik grants corpus licences only as long as there are sufficient financial means in the fund.
    • FID Linguistik reserves the right to change the offer without a special notice (e.g. the number of the available corpora).
    • FID Linguistik decides whether to grant a corpus licence or not. FID Linguistik reserves the right to consult independent reviewers when processing the requests.
    • There is no entitlement to the granting of a corpus licence.
    • FID Linguistik reserves the right to contact the users and request a feedback on their research results. This serves the internal documentation as well as the reporting to the DFG.