Prof. Douglas Biber - "Historical shifts in modification patterns with complex noun phrase structures: How long can you go without a verb?"
Prof. Jennifer Thomas - "Negotiating meaning: a pragmatic analysis of indirectness in political interviews"
Prof. Geoffrey Sampson - "Thoughts on Twenty Years of Drawing Trees"
Prof. Mick Short - "Style in Fiction and Non-fiction: A Corpus-based approach to Speech, Thought and Writing Presentation"

Corpus Linguistics 2001 was a forum for all concerned with the computer-assisted empirical analysis of natural language. Our definition of 'corpus' is broad, and we welcomed those working on substantial literary texts or other kinds of text collection as well as more 'traditional' corpus linguists.

Similarly, we wished to encourage further cross-fertilization between work occurring in language engineering (e.g. information extraction, parsing) and linguistics. We believe that corpus linguists should be aware of the latest developments in language processing. We also believe that language engineers should be aware of the findings and needs of corpus linguists.

The aims of Corpus Linguistics 2001 were:

1. to encourage dialogue between those working on similar issues in different languages and between areas with a (perhaps as yet untapped) potential to interact.

2. to encourage dialogue between researchers using corpora in linguistics and those using corpora in language engineering.

3. to celebrate the life and works of Geoffrey Leech.

Geoffrey Leech reaches 65 in 2001, and as part of the celebrations for this event, a special series of lectures was given during the conference by four invited speakers who have worked closely with Geoff at various stages in his career: Doug Biber, Jenny Thomas, Geoff Sampson and Mick Short.