DOI: 10.35111/5s4k-q428
title: French Gigaword Second Edition

description: <h3>Introduction</h3><br>
<p>French Gigaword Second Edition is a comprehensive archive of newswire text data that has been acquired over several years by LDC. This second edition updates <a href="http://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2006T17">French Gigaword First Edition (LDC2006T17)</a> and adds material collected from August 1, 2006 through December 31, 2008.</p><br>
<p>The two distinct international sources of French newswire in this edition, and the time spans of collection covered for each, are as follows:</p><br>
<ul><br>
<li>Agence France-Presse (afp_fre) May 1994 - Dec 2008</li><br>
<li>Associated Press Worldstream, French (apw_fre) Nov 1994 - Dec 2008</li><br>
</ul><br>
<p>The seven-letter codes in parentheses include the three-character source name abbreviations and the three-character language code (fre) separated by an underscore (_) character. The three-letter language code conforms to LDCs internal convention based on the ISO 639-3 standard. These codes are used in the directory names where the data files are found and in the prefix that appears at the beginning of every data file name. They are also used (in all UPPER CASE) as the initial portion of the DOC id strings that uniquely identify each news story.</p><br>
<h3>Data</h3><br>
<p>The overall totals for each source are summarized below. The Totl-MB numbers show the amount of data obtained when the files are uncompressed (i.e., approximately 15 gigabytes, total) the Gzip-MB column shows totals for compressed file sizes and the K-wrds numbers are the number of whitespace-separated tokens (of all types) after all SGML tags are eliminated.</p><br>
<table><br>
<tbody><br>
<tr><br>
<td>Source</td><br>
<td>#Files</td><br>
<td>Gzip-MB</td><br>
<td>Totl-MB</td><br>
<td>K-wrds</td><br>
<td>#DOCs</td><br>
</tr><br>
<tr><br>
<td>AFP_FRE</td><br>
<td>172</td><br>
<td>2408</td><br>
<td>4079</td><br>
<td>560000</td><br>
<td>2060803</td><br>
</tr><br>
<tr><br>
<td>APW_FRE</td><br>
<td>171</td><br>
<td>2280</td><br>
<td>1719</td><br>
<td>241324</td><br>
<td>0872573</td><br>
</tr><br>
<tr><br>
<td>TOTAL</td><br>
<td>343</td><br>
<td>4688</td><br>
<td>5789</td><br>
<td>801324</td><br>
<td>2933376</td><br>
</tr><br>
</tbody><br>
</table><br>
<p>The following tables present Text-MB, K-wrds and #DOCS broken down by source and DOC type Text-MB represents the total number of characters (including whitespace) after SGML tags are eliminated.</p><br>
<p>APW_FRE1942982852240</p><br>
<table><br>
<tbody><br>
<tr><br>
<td>Source</td><br>
<td>Text-MB</td><br>
<td>K-wrds</td><br>
<td>#DOCs</td><br>
</tr><br>
<tr><br>
<td colspan="4">type=advis:</td><br>
</tr><br>
<tr><br>
<td>AFP_FRE</td><br>
<td>88</td><br>
<td>11788</td><br>
<td>48712</td><br>
</tr><br>
<tr><br>
<td>APW_FRE</td><br>
<td>14</td><br>
<td>2303</td><br>
<td>9235</td><br>
</tr><br>
<tr><br>
<td>TOTAL</td><br>
<td>103</td><br>
<td>14091</td><br>
<td>57947</td><br>
</tr><br>
<tr><br>
<td colspan="4">type=multi:</td><br>
</tr><br>
<tr><br>
<td>AFP_FRE</td><br>
<td>59</td><br>
<td>8411</td><br>
<td>10269</td><br>
</tr><br>
<tr><br>
<td>TOTAL</td><br>
<td>253</td><br>
<td>38239</td><br>
<td>62509</td><br>
</tr><br>
<tr><br>
<td colspan="4">type=other:</td><br>
</tr><br>
<tr><br>
<td>AFP_FRE</td><br>
<td>178</td><br>
<td>58514</td><br>
<td>8411</td><br>
</tr><br>
<tr><br>
<td>APW_FRE</td><br>
<td>82</td><br>
<td>193981</td><br>
<td>29828</td><br>
</tr><br>
<tr><br>
<td>TOTAL</td><br>
<td>260</td><br>
<td>38239</td><br>
<td>38239</td><br>
</tr><br>
<tr><br>
<td colspan="4">type=story:</td><br>
</tr><br>
<tr><br>
<td>AFP_FRE</td><br>
<td>1824</td><br>
<td>198440</td><br>
<td>27216</td><br>
</tr><br>
<tr><br>
<td>APW_FRE</td><br>
<td>729</td><br>
<td>87662</td><br>
<td>13006</td><br>
</tr><br>
<tr><br>
<td>TOTAL</td><br>
<td>2553</td><br>
<td>286102</td><br>
<td>40222</td><br>
</tr><br>
</tbody><br>
</table><br>
<p>The data has undergone a consistent extent of quality control to eliminate out-of-band content and other obvious forms of corruption. Since the source data is generated manually on a daily basis, there will be a small percentage of human errors common to all sources: missing whitespace, incorrect or variant spellings, badly formed sentences, and so on, as are normally seen in newspapers. No attempt has been made to address this property of the data.</p><br>
<h3>Samples</h3><br>
<p>For an example of the data in this corpus, please view this <a href="desc/addenda/LDC2009T28.txt" rel="nofollow">image</a> of the text of French Gigaword.</p></br>
Portions © 1994-2008 Agence France-Presse, © 1994-2008 The Associated Press, © 2006, 2009 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania