UCL Summer School in English Corpus Linguistics 2019

I am pleased to announce the seventh annual Summer School in English Corpus Linguistics to be held at University College London from 1-3 July.

The Summer School is a short three-day intensive course aimed at PhD-level students and researchers who wish to get to grips with Corpus Linguistics.

Please note that this course is very popular, and numbers are deliberately limited on a first-come, first-served basis! You will be taught in a small group by a teaching team.

Each day begins with a theory lecture, followed by a guided hands-on workshop with corpora, and a more self-directed and supported practical session in the afternoon.

UCL Summer School in English Corpus Linguistics 2017

I am pleased to announce the fifth annual Summer School in English Corpus Linguistics to be held at University College London from 5-7 July.

The Summer School is a short three-day intensive course aimed at PhD-level students and researchers who wish to get to grips with Corpus Linguistics. Numbers are deliberately limited on a first-come, first-served basis. You will be taught in a small group by a teaching team.

Each day begins with a theory lecture, followed by a guided hands-on workshop with corpora, and a more self-directed and supported practical session in the afternoon.

Coping with imperfect data

Introduction

One of the challenges for corpus linguists is that many of the distinctions that we wish to make are either not annotated in a corpus at all or, if they are represented in the annotation, unreliably annotated. This issue frequently arises in corpora to which an algorithm has been applied, but where the results have not been checked by linguists, a situation which is unavoidable with mega-corpora. However, this is a general problem. We would always recommend that cases be reviewed for accuracy of annotation.

A version of this issue also arises when checking for the possibility of alternation, that is, to ensure that items of Type A can be replaced by Type B items, and vice-versa. An example might be epistemic modal shall vs. will. Most corpora, including richly-annotated corpora such as ICE-GB and DCPSE, do not include modal semantics in their annotation scheme. In such cases the issue is not that the annotation is “imperfect”, rather that our experiment relies on a presumption that the speaker has the choice of either type at any observed point (see Aarts et al. 2013), but that choice is conditioned by the semantic content of the utterance.