geezorg/enh-corpus

Corpus collection of the Ethiopian News Headlines. # The Ethiopian News Headlines Corpus Collection This repository houses the corpus of the Ethiopian News Headlines (ENH) service that ran from late Hamle 1989 - Yekatit 1997. The ENH was published initially under the ENH.EthiopiaOnline.Net website, then later under both EthioZena.Net and News.Com.Et . The service came to an end in the midst of the chaotic 1997 Ethiopian election period when agents of the government begun an investigation of the service operations. While online publishing stopped, out of concern for the safety of the staff, offline corpus development continued up until Tahsas 2002. After this time, focus shifted to developing a book based corpus. The ENH effort reached a total volume of **13,079** articles from **126** newspapers. In 1998 (GC) it was responsible for no less than 95% of the first 1 million words of Amharic appearing online. The full corpus collection can be downloaded under the “Releases” link of this repository. ## Terse Background The ENH got its start as a private research corpus. Typist were instructed to type content *exactly* as they saw it in news articles and *not* correct typographic errors. Invariably the typist would introduce their own typographic errors which would become indistinguishable from the source errors. This was deemed OK since error detection and correction was very much a part of the research objective. These errors remain in the corpus. The value of the growing current news corpus to the diaspora was immediately evident and so they were published online at the end of 1989 EC with the help of Joseph Kibur of NetNation. Promoting the free press in Ethiopia was another goal of the publishing service. Newspaper publishers in Addis Ababa were approached to provide their weekly content to the service and indirectly its corpus. A number of publishers saw the value of reaching a world wide audience and contributed their full weekly edition's worth of articles (which they otherwise would have deleted to save …