Forrest Richey is collecting inexpensive PC/Mac software to interest students in text analysis or synthesis. Send leads or requests to far@medinah.atc.ucarb.com. So far he's found: BABBLE for 1st-order Markov generation of word strings ("sentences"); TRAVESTY for Markov generation of fixed-length character strings ("words"); NAMEGRAM for finding "contained words" or anagrams of a string; and DADAPOEM for generating structured phrases and sentences. Also Karma Manager, a Mac anagram generator. [LINGUIST, 5/25/93.]

An expanded 2nd edition of "The New Hacker's Dictionary" will be published this fall. The proof text, version 2.9.12, is available as jargon2912.txt.z in pub/gnu on prep.ai.mit.edu. A version for the GNU Emacs INFO browser is jargon.info.z. vh.tar.z is a hypertext viewer. New and changed entries since the 1st edition, 2.9.6, are in jargon-upd.z. You can unpack the files with the uncompressed gzip-1.0.6.shar source. [Eric S. Raymond (esr@snark.thyrsus.com). Ed Vielmetti, 5/16/93. net-happenings.]

Irving Kind's dictionary of computer terms can be FTP'd as babel93b.txt in pub/info/help-net on ftp.temple.edu. You can also get it from Temple's gopher. [Stan Horwitz (stan@vm.temple.edu), CARR-L, 5/10/93.]

A Webster's Dictionary service can be reached by "telnet cs.indiana.edu 2627". Type "HELP" to get started, then "DEFINE " for a definition. [Barry Kort (barry@michael.ai.mit.edu), KIDSPHERE, 5/9. CARR-L, 5/10/93.]

The DIMAP-2 package includes a Merriam-Webster Concise Electronic Dictionary (CED) with 80K entry points and Unix dictionary maintenance utilities for building your own subsets or augmentations. One tool lets you tag text with part-of-speech and feature data. $350 for individual use; demo copy for $15. $50 manual. Ken Litkowski (1520.307@compuserve.com), CL Research, 20239 Lea Pond Place, Gaithersburg MD 20879; (301) 926-5904. [SCHOLAR, 5/25/93.]

Roland Stuckardt has compiled information on four parsers for English: Alvey NL Tools, English Constraint Grammar (ENGCG), English Slot Grammar, and PUNDIT. Contact stuckard @darmstadt.gmd.de. [LINGUIST, 5/11/93.]

Bernard Comrie has compiled a list of BBSs for the study of specific languages and language groups -- including Esperanto, Lojban, Klingon, and other constructed languages. Contact comrie@vm.usc.edu. [LINGUIST, 5/11/93.]

Statistics, natural language, and computing are the subjects of a new discussion list for corpus-based linguistics studies. Sign up with empiricists-request@csli.stanford. edu. [SCHOLAR, 5/25/93.]

A survey of English electronic corpora and related resources is being published in Edwards & Lampert's "Talking Data: Transcription and Coding in Discourse Research" (Erlbaum Publishers, 4/15). [Gabriel Decio (decio@mace.cc.purdue.edu), LINGUIST, 4/27/93.]

The CORPORA discussion list is by the group that distributes CD-ROM corpora for the International Computer Archive of Modern English. Write to corpora-request@nora.hd.uib.no to join. You might also want the CPET list of telnet-accessible corpora at Georgetown, available from pmangiafico@guvax.georgetown.edu. [Jane Edwards (edwards@cogsci.berkeley.edu), LINGUIST, 5/6/93.]

Tony Robinson's updated list of homophones in General American English is available by FTP as homophones-1.01.txt in comp.speech/data on svr-ftp.eng.cam.ac.uk. [Evan.Antworth @sil.org, comp.ai.nat-lang, 5/19/93.]

The Text Software Initiative (TSI) is an international effort to develop and promote standardized free software for written/spoken text analysis and use. TSI is interested in markup, linguistic analysis and annotation, browsing and retrieval, statistical analysis, etc. Members will coordinate with the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), the Expert Advisory Group on Language Engineering Standards (EAGLES), and other groups working on interface conventions, programming style guidelines, modular functions, code libraries, testing and evaluation, etc. All contributed software will be distributed under the Free Software Foundation's "copyleft" rules whereby all modifications must be available at no charge. Distribution will be through groups such as the FSF, RELATOR, and the Linguistic Data Consortium. TSI cannot provide technical support, but will organize a network of consultants. Coordinators are Nancy Ide (ide@cs.vassar.edu) and Jean Veronis (veronis@grtc.cnrs-mrs.fr); advisors are Susan Armstrong, Mark Liberman, Makoto Nagao, Mark Olsen, Richard Stallman, Donald Walker, and Antonio Zampolli. [ide@grtc.cnrs-mrs.fr, LINGUIST, 5/29/93.]