CLARET is a new national research training programme in corpus linguistics running in the UK from November 2007 to June 2008. It is open to doctoral students whose work involves the investigation of large amounts of electronically-stored language data. For details of related activities at Liverpool, Nottingham, Birmingham and Reading Universities see the main CLARET page.

The focus of the Lancaster workshop will be on corpus compilation, modes of corpus annotation, statistical approaches to corpus data and will address these issues for non-English and historical corpora in addition to the traditional focus on modern corpora of English.

The workshop will take place from March 31st until April 1st 2008 at Lancaster University in the Conference Centre in Meeting Room 3. It will consist of presentations, seminars and a hands-on session. A provisional version of the programme appears below. Please check this page for updates.

Monday March 31 2008
12.00 – 13.00	Registration and lunch
13.00 – 13.20	Welcome and introduction (Paul Rayson)
13.20 – 14.00	History of Corpus Compilation and Annotation (Geoffrey Leech)
14.00 – 14.40	Compiling topic-specific corpora from limited-access online databases (Costas Gabrielatos)
14.40 – 15.20	Swearing in English – corpus reuse and bespoke annotation (Tony McEnery)
15.20 – 15.50	Coffee/Tea break
15.50 – 16.30	Automatic part-of-speech tagging (Andrew Hardie)
16.30 – 17.10	Corpus compilation and studying diachronic change (Nick Smith)
18.00 – 19.00	Wine reception
Tuesday April 1 2008
09.00 – 09.30	Semantic annotation (Andrew Wilson)
09.30 – 10.00	Manual annotation for historical pragmatics (Dawn Archer)
10.00 – 10.30	Coffee/Tea break
10.30 – 12.30	Wmatrix hands-on: key semantic domains (Paul Rayson & Dawn Archer)
12.30 – 13.30	Lunch
13.30 – 14.30	The world wide web as a source of corpus data (Paul Baker)
14.30 – 15.00	Summary and roundup
15.00 – 15.30	Coffee/tea and departure

Application procedure

In order to apply for a place, please download an application form, complete it and email the result to Sarah Brown (sarah@comp.lancs.ac.uk) at Lancaster University by 15th February 2008. Each CLARET workshop is limited to 30 participants, with priority given to AHRC-funded doctoral students. There is a small fee of £10 per workshop for participants from partner institutions, and £40 per workshop for participants from other institutions. A subsidy is available towards participants' UK travel and accommodation costs for each workshop.

Maps of the university and travel instructions are provided on the university's website. The workshop will take place in the conference centre and this is number 21 on the campus map. For those staying on campus, the check in time is anytime after 14.00 on Monday, and check out is by 10.00 on Tuesday. Room keys should be collected from the Conference Centre Reception. We expect that accommodation will be in the John Creed Building: number 13 on the campus map. Breakfast will be served in County restaurant. The conference centre reception can provide parking permits on arrival. Further details are in the delegate information pack provided by the conference centre. Participants will have access to the internet and WiFi via temporary usernames, for more details see the information on the campus wireless network. For those visitors who want to see more of Lancaster as a tourist, or go for a meal in town on Monday evening, there is a downloadable map from tourist information, restaurant reviews from Virtual Lancaster and a Google Map of Lancaster restaurants.

CLARET is a collaboration between the Universities of Birmingham, Lancaster, Liverpool, Nottingham, and Reading and is funded by award 07/01/N under the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Collaborative Research Training Scheme.