LINGUIST List 11.369

Mon Feb 21 2000

FYI: International Corpus of English Now Available

Editor for this issue: James Yuells <jameslinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Charles Meyer, Three Components of the International Corpus of English Now Available

Three components of the International Corpus of English (ICE) are now
available. For details about each component, see the websites given
below. To obtain a copy of a given component, write to the contact
person for each component.

ICE-Great Britain

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/ice-gb/index.htm
contact: Gerry Nelson (g.nelsonucl.ac.uk)

ICE-East Africa

http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/phil/english/real/eafrica/index.htm
contact: Diana Hudson-Ettle (diana.hudson-ettlephil.tu-chemnitz.de)

ICE-New Zealand

http://www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/
contact: Bernadette Vine (Corpus-Managervuw.ac.nz)

The International Corpus of English (ICE) is the first large-scale
effort to study the development of English as a world language. The ICE
Project includes research teams from countries such as Australia,
Canada, East Africa (Kenya and Tanzania), Great Britain, Hong Kong,
India, Ireland, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and
the United States,. Each regional group is collecting comparable samples
of spoken and written English representing the regional variety of
English found in the country the group is affiliated with. To ensure
that a variety of different types of English are included, each team is
collecting one million words of English divided into 2,000 word samples
representing various types of English: spontaneous conversations,
speeches, broadcast discussions, learned prose, private letters,
newspaper reportage, and fiction, to name some of the categories that
are represented.

Future Developments: An interim release of more components of ICE is
scheduled for next year. Release 2 of ICE-GB will be available soon.
This will include everything in Release 1, plus the digitized sound
recordings, aligned to the transcriptions, and an enhanced version of
ICECUP (a text retrieval program bundled with ICE-GB). Release 2 will
enable researchers to hear the original recordings while examining the
corresponding grammatical analyses on screen.

For more details about the ICE project, see:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/ice/index.htm

Charles Meyer
International Coordinator, ICE Project
University of Massachusetts at Boston