Review of CL 2003 , the International Conference on Corpus Linguistics

Lancaster is a small city in northwest England. The university campus is set amidst hills, woods, and green grass, and you can enjoy watching rabbits, ducks, and squirrels. It was sunny during the day and cold in the night for all participants who attended the CL2003 conference this year in Lancaster. CL2003 is the International Conference on Corpus Linguistics, held at Lancaster University between 28 and 31 March 2003; 210 participants from many countries were there. The first International Conference on Corpus Linguistics, in 2001 (Rayson et al 2001), was organised to honour Geoffrey Leech on his 65th birthday; CL2003 was a repeat by popular demand. The conference included four one-day workshops, and four days of main papers sessions; one pre-conference workshop produced separate Proceedings (Simov and Osenova 2003), other papers were included in the main conference Proceedings (Archer et al 2003). Talks were presented in three different parallel sessions, classified according to topics such as: corpus building, parsing techniques, translation studies, corpus tools, taggers, morphosyntactic annotation, information extraction, semantics, text comparison, European minority languages, word frequency studies, internet English, and speech annotation. A wide range of domains related to corpus-based natural language processing was covered. Five invited talks were presented; the first was ‘What can corpus linguistics tell us about linguistic creativity?’ by Michael Hoey. The second was ‘Everything you wanted to know about the American National Corpus..but weren’t afraid to ask’ by Nancy Ide. The third was ‘Frame, phrase, or function: a comparison between frame semantics and local grammars’ by Susan Hunston. Geoffrey Sampson addressed the issue “Are we nearly there yet, mum?” The last was ‘Corpora and the lexicon’ by Nicoletta Calzolari. All five talks were exciting, discussing new issues and ideas related to language and corpora.