Corpus Linguistics, Computer Tools, and Applications – State of the Art

The Editor: Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk is Professor Ordinarius of English language and linguistics at the University of Łódź (Poland), where she holds the position of Chair of English Language and Applied Linguistics. She is also honorary professor in linguistics and modern English language at the University of Lancaster (UK).

«PALC celebrates its 10th anniversary with a bumper conference proceeding – comprising papers on challenges related to learners of English, machine and human translation, terminology extraction, subtitling and challenges related to the role of the ubiquitous Internet in teaching and learning of languages. And, if this was not enough there are two papers related to what the authors call the equivalent of a GUT (grand unified theory) of language. PALC is a conference which always has had an exciting mix of scholars, looking at language from different perspectives but unified in using text corpora, and now speech corpora, and in substantiating their claims through the use of the corpora. And, it is in PALC that West is now meeting East: the Anglo-American-Continental linguists are finding about central and eastern European scholarship; a touch of Chinese and Arabic language scholarship makes PALC a heady mix. These proceedings should and will be widely read.» (Khurshid Ahmad, Professor of Computer Science, Department of Computer Science, Trinity College, Dublin)

• Contents: Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk: PALC 2007: Where are we now? – Paul Rayson/Dawn Archer/Alistair Baron/Nicholas Smith: Travelling through time with corpus annotation software – Eugene H. Casad: Parsing texts and compiling a dictionary with shoebox – Belinda Maia/Rui Silva/Anabela Barreiro/Cecília Fróis: ‘N-grams in search of theories’ – Piotr Pęzik/Jung-jae Kim/Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhmann: MedEvi - A permuted concordancer for the biomedical domain – Patrick Hanks: Why the «word sense disambiguation problem» can’t be solved, and what should be done instead – Rafał L. Górski: Representativeness of a written part of a Polish general-reference corpus. Primary notes – Michael P. Oakes: Measures from information retrieval to find the words which are characteristic of a corpus – Dimitra Anastasiou/Oliver Čulo: Using topological information for detecting idiomatic verb phrases in German – Elżbieta Dura: Synergies in term extraction from different corpora – Jurij Fiedoruszkow: Methods for electronic retrieval of new words in Russian – Michael Hoey/Matthew Brook O’Donnell: The beginning of something important?: Corpus evidence on the text beginnings of hard new stories – Dagmar Divjak: On (in)frequency and (un)acceptability – Agnieszka Kaleta: Corpus-cognitive methods in discriminating between synonyms: a case of ‘to end’ and ‘to finish’ – Audronė Šolienė: Markers of epistemic possibility and necessity in Lithuanian and English: A corpus-based study – Janusz Badio: Verb complementation in speech - a corpus study – Heli Tissari: On the concept of sadness: Looking at words in contexts derived from corpora – Peter Crompton: Definiteness and indefiniteness in theme: A corpus-based analysis – Anna Bączkowska: Contrasting Polish and English prepositions: The case of w/na deszczu vs. in the rain and w/na słońcu vs. in the sun – Anna Kamińska: Creating comparable corpora for historical syntactic studies: The case of Old English and Old High German – Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski: Variation across disciplines and genres. A preliminary multi-dimensional analysis – Christoph Haase/Josef Schmied: Clause linking in specialized and popular academic English: An investigation into scientific texts from the space corpus – Jerzy Gaszewski: Polish and English answering systems – Salvatore Giammaressi: Second generation Translation Memory systems and formulaic sequences – Julia Lavid: Contrastes: An online English-Spanish textual database for contrastive and translation learning – Meng Ji: Phraseology in corpus-based translation studies – Włodzimierz Sobkowiak: Dictionary definitions as text corpora - a phonolexicographic perspective – Michal Křen: Compilation of the Dictionary of Karel Čapek – Piotr Bański/Beata Wójtowicz: New XML-encoded Swahili-Polish dictionary: Micro- and macrostructure – Geoffrey Williams: Are We European? What verbs reveal about identity in Le Monde and elsewhere – Adam Pawłowski: Corpus approach to the Polish communist propaganda language from the Stalinist period (1953). The method of Short Semantic Representation (SSR) – Monika Kopytowska: Key concepts in framing Africa’s problems - analysing a corpus of TV news reports – Alex Boulton: Looking for empirical evidence of data-driven learning at lower levels – Joanna Jendryczka-Wierszycka: Vagueness in Polglish speech – Łukasz Grabowski: FLT and teaching translation with the National Russian Corpus. Theoretical overview, actual state and future prospects in Poland