Last modified 22 January 1996. In recent years, numerous data collection initiatives and corpus projects have collected large amounts of electronic texts. As a result, the need for generally available, flexible text analytic software tools is substantially greater than ever in the past. Unfortunately, the software for corpus analysis that exists at present only begins to cover research growing needs.
Industrial software is often expensive or unavailable, and usually hard to adapt or extend.
On the other hand, the substantial body of natural language processing academic software is often experimental and hard to get, hard to install, under-documented, and sometimes unreliable. In both cases tools are typically embedded in large, non-adaptable systems which are fundamentally incompatible. Although efforts to develop standards for data representation are underway, little effort has been made to develop standards for software, and software reusability is virtually non-existent. As a result, there is a serious lack of generally usable tools to manipulate and analyze the text corpora and collections that are now becoming widely available. However, given the lack of experience and background in linguistic software standardization and the limited amount of time and effort allocated to the subgroup, we could not accomplish the development of complete guidelines and standards for the development of corpus software.