DOI: 10.35111/zfbe-bt19
title: Hong Kong Laws Parallel Text

description: <h3>Introduction</h3><br>
<p>Hong Kong Laws Parallel Text was developed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC)  and consists of processed and sentenced-aligned Chinese-English documents from the Department of Justice of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) of the Peoples Republic of China.</p><br>
<p>LDC wishes to thank the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the Peoples Republic of China for granting the LDC permission to distribute this data to the research community.</p><br>
<h3>DATA</h3><br>
<p>This corpora is organized into 19 parallel file pairs for a total of 38 files. Each parallel file pair is named hklaws.nn.[ec] where:</p><br>
<ul><br>
<li>nn = sequence number and</li><br>
<li>the file extensions, c = Cantonese and e = English</li><br>
</ul><br>
<p>Each files holds up to 2,000 sequentially numbered sentences tagged with a sentence index and sequence number as described below for a total of 37,807 sentence indices across all 19 file pairs. The sentence numbering spans the file pairs such that the initial sentence index (in files hklaws.01.e and hklaws.01.c) is 1, and the last sentence index (in files hklaws.19.e and hklaws.19.c) is 37807. The sentence numbering establishes the sentence parallelism two sentences having the same index and sequence number are purported to be parallel in content.</p><br>
<p>Each sentence index may contain one or more sequentially numbered sentences, with corresponding files in English and Chinese containing the corresponding sets of sentences. The initial sequence number of each sentence is 1. The sentence sequence number plus the sentence index number is sufficient to uniquely identify parallel sentences. There are 313,659 sentences in the corpora.</p><br>
<p>Each sentence is of the form:...... ...... where # represents a one to five digit sentence index or sequence number.</p><br>
<p>Automatic sentence alignment was done at the LDC.</p><br>
<p>The <a href="desc/addenda/hklaws.example.c.html" rel="nofollow">example.c</a> and <a href="desc/addenda/hklaws.example.e.html" rel="nofollow">example.e</a> files contains sample corresponding Chinese and English Law files from the corpus.</p><br>
<p>The Chinese files are encoded in BIG5 with user-defined characters by HKSAR. See <a href="http://www.info.gov.hk/gccs/" rel="nofollow"> http://www.info.gov.hk/gccs </a> for details.</p><br>
<h3>Copying and distribution</h3><br>
<p>Permission has been granted to the Linguistic Data Consortium to make and distribute copies of the laws, press releases and news of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, provided this copyright notice and permission notice are distributed with all copies.</p><br>
<p>Permission has been given to the Linguistic Data Consortium to reproduce the laws, press releases, and/or news articles from the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government website for research, education, and technology development.</p><br>
<h3>Updates</h3><br>
<p>There are no updates at this time.</p><br>
<h3>Additional Licensing Instructions</h3><br>
<p>This 'members-only' corpora is available to current members who can request the data at the listed reduced-license fee. Contact <a href="mailto:ldc@ldc.upenn.edu">ldc@ldc.upenn.edu</a> for information about becoming a member.</p></br>
Portions © 1999 The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, © 2000 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania