In 1957 the French government initiated the creation of a new
dictionary of the French language, the Trésor de la Langue
Française. In order to provide access to a large body of word
samples, it was decided to transcribe an extensive selection of
French texts for use with a computer. Twenty years later, a
corpus totaling some 150 million words had been created,
representing a broad range of written French -- from novels and
poetry to biology and mathematics -- stretching from the
seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. It soon became apparent
that this corpus of French texts was an important resource not
only for lexicographers, but also for many other types of
humanists and social scientists engaged in French studies - on
both sides of the Atlantic. The result of this realization was
American and French Research on the Treasury of the French
Language (ARTFL) -- a cooperative project established in 1981 by
the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and the
University of Chicago. The ARTFL project has fo