Describes the International Corpus of English Corpus Utility Program (ICECUP), a computer-based text retrieval program designed to search a tagged corpus for words, word elements, and their grammatical roles. Explains the search, display options, concordance, and subcorpus selection features of the ICECUP program. (MDM)

Describes the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE), a project at the University of Louvain in Belgium that collects written work from, and analyzes the usage of, advanced adult English as a Foreign Language learners. Recurring combinations and concordances in ICLE are examined. (Contains five references.) (MDM)

This paper presents an introduction to language engineering software, especially for computerized language and text corpora. The focus of the paper is on small and relatively independent pieces of software designed for specific, often low-level language analysis tasks, and on tools in the public domain. Discussion begins with the application of…

This paper describes a computerized system for tagging language corpora that accommodates the special conditions in Bulgarian language research (notably, lack of advanced technology and corresponding user knowledge). SUPERLINGUA has been developed in the DOS environment with consideration for these conditions. Information on product use, users,…

The background, rationale, elements, and organization of the newly-formed Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) database containing child language data-transcripts are outlined in this first issue of their newsletter. The system was formed in response to a need for greater efficiency in data sharing, greater precision in data collection…

A survey gathering word lists from 40 locations in the Zambales Mountains of the Philippines, for statistical comparison, resulted in the definition of six distinct Negrito languages: Abelen, Magqanchi, Aberlen, Magqindi, Ambala, and Mabeken. With the use of a computer program, WORDSURV, designed for word list comparison, an Ayta language tree was…

The demand for extensive reusability of large language text collections for natural languages processing research requires development of standardized encoding formats. Such formats must be capable of representing different kinds of information across the spectrum of text types and languages, capable of representing different levels of…

This paper discusses inclusion of the Russian language in European language resource development. It is suggested that European initiatives to develop language resources can not afford to ignore Russian, and that there is much work to do to resolve differences in resources on the two sides of the former Iron Curtain. A 1995 project, undertaken by…

Humor, a reversible, string-based unification approach for lemmatizing and disambiguating language data, has been used for both language corpus analysis and creation of a variety of linguistic software applications such as spell-checking. The system is language-independent, allowing multilingual applications for a variety of language types. Its…

Contends that computer-aided literature studies have failed to impact the field as a whole. Asserts that new databases, such as TLG or ARTFL, allow wide-spectrum analyses that may transform the way in which literature is studied. (CFR)

Currently, no machine translation (MT) system is capable of successfully imitating the behavior of a human translator, and there exists no formal description of what an MT system is supposed to do. The biggest problem in practice is disambiguation. However, various types of existing systems do help reduce language barriers, even if they are poor…

An experiment compared the tagging of two languages: Czech, a highly inflected language with a high degree of ambiguity, and English. For Czech, the corpus was one gathered in the 1970s at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences; for English, it was the Wall Street Journal corpus. Results indicate 81.53 percent accuracy for Czech and 96.83 percent…

The four 1997 issues include these articles: "Introduction to Government and Binding Theory," parts 4-7 (Cheryl A. Black), which discuss constraints on movement, semantic roles and case theory, binding theory, and more recent additions to the theory; "A Scholar's Ethic" (William J. Samarin), concerning the behavior of scholars…

A computer program for classifying elements of a language corpus for large-scale analysis is discussed. The approach is based on the assumption that there is a natural unit in speech processing and production, called a tone unit. The program "tags" the five grammatical phrase types (verb, adverb, adjective, noun, and prepositional) to…

MULTEXT is a European Union project to identify and develop language resources, language-related software, and standards to make the resources maximally usable. MULTEXT-EAST is a spinoff project to develop significant resources for six Central and Eastern European (CEE) languages (Bulgarian, Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Romanian, Slovenian) and…