Help the ANC

We are always looking for a few good people to help us out. Even if you are not able to contribue texts or annotations, you may have talents we need. Check below for a project that may interest you.

• Annotate. There is a lot of data and a lot of annotation that needs to be done; more they we can hope to provide. However, our use of standoff markup makes is easy for us to provide any and all annotations, so if you have annotated any part of the ANC we urge you to contribute it. Contributed annotations will be made freely available via this website for use with the ANC data.
• Test. We would like some real world feedback from people using the ANC. We are going where few have gone before (standoff markup) and are going there in leaps and bounds. How does this work for you?
• Design. Face it, we are computational linguists and computer programmers; we need someone with some graphics/layout talent to help us with the ANC web pages. However, being "markup people", we use strict XHTML and CSS for all our pages, so someone with talent could likely make this page look better by tweaking our CSS style sheet.
• Write code. While the ANC provides several tools for working with standoff markup, these tools are a proof of concept rather than a suite of production grade programs. In particular the org.xces.standoff.parsers package should support the full JAXP API (rather than the "just enough" implementation used now). Another good coding project is Xoro. A rewrite of Xoro would make an excellent senior project for someone with an A or B in a course on Compiler Design.
• Financial support. The ANC project is currently funded by the National Science Foundation, but this funding is neither substantial nor guaranteed to continue past June 1, 2005. We therefore welcome the support of organizations and individuals to help ensure that the ANC can continue working toward its goals, thereby providing an invaluable resource for dictionary makers, linguists, software developers, and educators for generations to come.
  
  We especially urge you to consider contributing to the ANC if you are using the ANC in a large research project with substantial funding, and feel we are worth more than $75.
  
  Contributions to ANC Consortium, a non-profit organization, may be tax deductible. If you are interested in contributing, please contact us for more information.