-
CASS in the 2017 ESRC Festival of Social Science
The ESRC Festival of Social Science is an annual celebration of social science research – comprised of a huge array of public events of all kinds, and designed to promote awareness of UK social science research across the board. This year, it runs from 4th to 11th November. As the team at ESRC says, “You may be surprised at just…
-
Workshop on Corpus Linguistics in Ghana
Back in 2014, a team from CASS ran a well-received introductory workshop on Corpus Linguistics in Accra, Ghana – a country where Lancaster University has a number of longstanding academic partnerships and has recently established a campus. We’re pleased to announce that in February of this year, we will be returning to Ghana and running…
-
2014/15 in retrospective: Perspectives on Chinese
Looking back over the academic year as it draws to a close, one of the highlights for us here at CASS was the one-day seminar we hosted in January on Perspectives on Chinese: Talks in Honour of Richard Xiao. This event celebrated the contributions to linguistics of CASS co-investigator Dr. Richard Zhonghua Xiao, on the…
-
In memory: Professor Geoffrey Leech
It is with great sorrow that we report the death on 19th August of Professor Geoffrey Leech. Geoff was not only the founder of the UCREL research centre for corpus linguistics at Lancaster University, he was also the first Professor and founding Head of the Department of Linguistics and English Language. His contributions to linguistics –…
-
Log Ratio – an informal introduction
In the latest version of CQPweb (v 3.1.7) a new statistic for keywords, collocations and lockwords is introduced, called Log Ratio. “Log Ratio” is actually my own made-up abbreviated title for something which is more precisely defined as either the binary log of the ratio of relative frequencies or the binary log of the relative…
-
Using version control software for corpus construction
There are two problems that often come up in collaborative efforts towards corpus construction. First, how do two or more people pool their efforts simultaneously on this kind of work – sharing the data as it develops without working at cross-purposes, repeating effort, or ending up with incompatible versions of the corpus? Second, how do…
-
A new version of EEBO on CQPweb
The version of the EEBO-TCP data that has been available on Lancaster University’s CQPweb server is now rather old (the TCP project adds text to the collection on a rolling basis), and, more importantly, does not contain any annotations. Recently I have devoted some time to running a newer version through UCREL’s standard annotation tools and then mounting the resulting dataset…
CASS Briefings
CASS: Briefings is a series of short, quick reads on the work being done at the ESRC/CASS research centre at Lancaster University, UK.