Lexical Computing is …
... a small research company, founded by Adam Kilgarriff in 2003. It works at the intersection of corpus and computational linguistics, and is committed to an empiricist approach to the study of language, in which corpora play a central role: for a very wide range of linguistic questions, if a suitable corpus is available, it will help our understanding. Its strap line is ‘corpora for all’.
It has a leading corpus query tool, the Sketch Engine, incorporating ‘word sketches’, one page corpus-driven summaries of word’s grammatical and collocational behaviour. The lead users for the Sketch Engine have been dictionary publishers and it is in day-to-day use for lexicography at Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Collins, Macmillan, Cornelsen and the Instituut voor Nederlandse Lexicologie (INL, Institute of Dutch Lexicology) among others.
To be able to provide corpus services, LCL needs corpora. As at March 2011 we have large corpora for 42 languages. (‘Large’ meaning over 20 million words; in most cases corpora are over 100 million words.) For the most part these are collected from the web – LCL is a lead player in the ‘web as corpus’ initiative – and have involved collaborations with language experts for the languages in question, for example:
- with Sivia Bernardini and colleagues at SSLMIT, University of Bologna, for their very large (ca 2 billion word) web corpora of German, Italian, English, French (DeWaC, ItWaC, UKWaC, FrWaC)
- with Prof. Chu-Ren Huang and colleagues at Academia Sinica, Taiwan, for segmentation and part-of-speech tagging for Chinese
- with Simon Krek and colleagues at Ljubljana University, on corpora, lemmatisation, part-of-speech tagging and the Sketch Grammar for Slovene
- with Phuong Le-Hong for lemmatisation, part-of-speech tagging and the Sketch Grammar for Vietnamese
- with Paul Thompson, Hilary Nesi and colleagues at the Universities of Warwick, Reading, Birmingham and Coventry over the Academic English
Company details
Lexical Computing Ltd.
71, Freshfield Road
Brighton BN2 0BL
East Sussex
UNITED KINGDOM
UK Company Registration: 04841901
VAT: GB844370721
Web: http://www.sketchengine.co.uk
E-mail: inquiries@sketchengine.co.uk
