TELRI

TRACTOR

TELRI Research Archive of Computational Tools and Resources

 TRACTOR Archive
www.tractor.bham.ac.uk

Frequently asked Questions

What is TRACTOR?

TRACTOR is the TELRI Research Archive of Computational Tools and Resources. It features monolingual and multilingual corpora and lexicons in a wide variety of languages, currently including Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, English, Estonian, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian and Uzbek. The archive, network and user community are a key part of the TELRI agenda to build links between the research communities in Western, Central and Eastern Europe.

If you don't know what this area of linguistics is all about, have a look at this glossary.

TRACTOR was launched in January 2000, and is only just starting to build up the archive and the user community. This also means that there may be a few glitches, so please report any problems, and try to be patient!

What is TELRI?

TRACTOR is a key part of TELRI II, a project which runs from the beginning of 1999 to the end of 2001. Following on from the successful TELRI I project, is a pan-European alliance of 28 focal national language technology institutions with the emphasis on Central and Eastern European and Newly Independent States. See the TELRI website for more information.

Where is TRACTOR?

The TRACTOR archive is maintained on a server in the Centre for Corpus Linguistics in the English Department at the University of Birmingham. It is managed by Anna Cermakova.

The website and archive were previously based in the Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim until December 2000. You may need to update some of your bookmarks if they point to solaris3.ids-mannheim.de. If you go to he Mannheim website now your browser will be redirected to Birmingham.

The domain name www.tractor.de has been hired from a commercial name broker, and currently points to tractor.bham.ac.uk/tractor, which is where the archive is stored.

Why don't my bookmarks work?

If you bookmarked a solaris3.ids-mannheim.de address this is no longer valid. The same might happen in the future if you have bookmarked a tractor.bham.ac.uk/tractor address. It's best to bookmark www.tractor.de, as it's easy to navigate from there.

Also, the use of .htm and .html suffixes was inconsistent around the website, and in January 2001 they were all changed to .html. Symbolic links from the old .htm names will be left around for a while.

Where are the tractors?

There aren't any. TRACTOR is just an acronym, and there is no information about farm machinery here. Sorry!

How do I join?

Fill in the form at http://www.tractor.de/docs/user.html and then fax it to +44 121 414 6053. Email the helpdesk if you have any problems. Then arrange for the Euro 50 annual fee to be paid (details on the form). There is a special reduced rate of Euro 20 for Central and East European countries outside of the EU, and for NIS countries.

If you also want to deposit some of your resources with TRACTOR for distribution, we will be very pleased to receive them. Please see information for text providers for more information. In this case the fee is waived.

Once these formalities are completed, we will email a user ID and password to you so that you can access the resources.

Documentation of tools

A TELRI Working Party is currently pursuing the task of documenting tools. For more information on this work, please see document specification on the website Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Latvia or Tomas Erjavec's pages at the Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana. If you have tools to deposit, mail the helpdesk.

Why is there not more information about the resources?

At present, the documentation of the resources is not standardised. Resources have been acquired at different times from many different places, where there are widely differing norms for mark-up, storage and documentation. In many cases, there are no norms at all, as the resource providers are pioneers in their academic community. Also, many of the researchers operate in difficult conditions with outdated hardware and software, and poor communications.

Despite these difficulties, three processes are ongoing to improve the documentation of the resources:

  1. Maximising the clarity and accessibility of the documentation on the website, using the existing information;
  2. Obtaining more information from the resource providers;
  3. Standardising the extent, nature and format of the documentation.
If you have any more information about the resources, whether or not you are the resource provider, please let us know.

What is the TUC?

The TUC is the TRACTOR User Community. This is the name given to everyone involved in depositing and accessing resources in the archive.

It has nothing to do with the British Trades Union Congress!

What are the different categories of membership, and why do you have them?

Members are categorised as academic, industrial or public.

These categories exist so that resource providers can specify which types of users may access their resources. However, providers are encouraged to make their resources available to all categories of user. Please note that direct commercial exploitation of the resources is not permitted by the user agreement for any category of user.

Who is in the TUC?

All members of the TELRI II project and the TELRI Association are automatically included in the TUC. Also all resource providers are offered free membership. In addition anyone who fills in the user agreement form and pays the fee can become a member.

We hope to soon be able to publish online a list of all TUC members, with contact details. (If you are a member and you would not like to be included in this list, please email the helpdesk.)

At present (February 2000, one month after the launch), there are some 40 academic and 3 industrial users.

Why do you charge a fee?

There is a small annual administrative fee charged for joining the TRACTOR User Community. This is waived in the case of members of the TELRI Association and users who also deposit resources.

The principal reason for doing this is in order to put membership on a formal basis. To put it bluntly, if researchers have to pay for access, then they usually have to alert their colleagues and masters to it and persuade them to authorise the payment. Also, having paid for something, they are more likely to use it.

TRACTOR needs an active User Community, and we would prefer to have a compact group of committed and active users, to a large number of people who register because it is free, and then take no active part in the activities. Having said that, we hope a large number of people and institutions join, and membership is not conditional on taking part in any activities!

How do I download resources?

Navigate through the website to the resources you require and then use http or ftp to download what you want. You will need a TUC user ID to actually access or download the resource files.

If you have trouble with this method, resources can be made available via ftp. Email the helpdesk to arrange this.

When I try to download, I get the data opening in my browser. How can I save to a file?

This depends on the settings for your browser. It may try to unpack and load in the browser window compressed files and tar archives. If you are using Netscape, you can hold down the SHIFT key while you click with the left mouse button on the link to the resource you want to download. Otherwise you need to adjust your local setup.

Are the resources available for commercial use?

No. If you want to make money from the resources in the archive, or include them in a product, or if you are not sure if what you are doing constitutes commercial use, you need to contact the resource provider. The licence agreement signed by the resource providers specifically excludes commerical use, so if want to exploit the resources for commerical use, then you need to negotiate a new licence with the resource provider.

The helpdesk will help to put you in touch with the owner of the resources if this is necessary.

How do I make contact with resource providers and other members of the TRACTOR User Community?

You can contact the TRACTOR helpdesk, or follow the links for contact details in the online catalogue.

You can also see information about TELRI members.

What sort of resources can I deposit?

Resources are gratefully received for the TRACTOR archive. We currently aim to build up the archive with language corpora, lexicons and software tools for processing language. If you have something different which would be of use to the human language technology community, then we would also be very pleased to hear from you!

Two types of resources are recognised:

  1. Standardised resources, validated by the acquisitions working group. It is hoped that eventually such resources will be accessible for online queries. These recommended standards are under development.
  2. Other resources, adopting different markup and storage conventions, which will be distributed in the form in which they are deposited. In this case, resource providers are asked to provide as much documentation as possible about the resources.

Please fill in a licence agreement form if you have already deposited or would like to deposit resources.

Draft standards for the documentation of software tools are now available at the LJU1 TELRI page at the Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

How do I upload my resources to the archive?

To deposit resources, email the helpdesk to get the password. Then FTP to: 
  tractor.bham.ac.uk
logging on as depositer. Put the files in the home directory.

IMPORTANT: then email straight away to helpdesk@tractor.de to say that the resources have been deposited.

Alternatively if you give us details of files and locations we will be happy to initiate FTPs from here.

Email the Tractor helpdesk with any queries.