Past events

BAAL Corpus Linguistics SIG event 2018
New Directions in DDL
Friday 8 June, Centre for Academic Writing, Coventry University

The idea that corpora offer great potential for language teaching/learning has existed for more than 30 years, since Tim Johns first started referring to Data Driven Learning (DDL) in the 1980s. However, this potential has yet to be fully realised in mainstream teaching. This BAAL Corpus Linguistics SIG event brought together a range of talks to show some ways in which DDL is being used in 2018 and discuss how we can integrate developments in technology to help the spread of this still innovative approach. The programme included an introduction to the BAWE quicklinks project which recently started at Coventry University. Guest speaker: Maggie Charles, University of Oxford
Event program with abstracts is here. 
Slides / recordings from the event are available at http://bawequicklinks.coventry.domains/latest-news-and-developments/

BAAL Corpus Linguistics SIG event 2017
Using Corpora in EAP
St Aidan’s College, Durham University 
This symposium brought together EAP practitioners who are using (or interested in using) corpora in their teaching.  The keynote speaker was Professor Hilary Nesi who led the BASE (British Academic Spoken English) and BAWE (British Academic Written English) corpora projects.  Members of the Durham University FOCUS corpus team also presented findings from the latest phase of the “Write on the Edge” project, using corpus data to help students to write in unfamiliar genres. There was a range of other talks on various aspects of using corpora in EAP. Event programme and presentation slides can be downloaded by clicking on the links below:
Event schedule
Hilary Nesi
Maggie Charles
Megan Bruce & Jessica Sequera
Malgorzata Drewniok & Adam George Dunn
Manal Alangari
Natalie Kübler & Clive Hamilton
Gill Kendon
Kamonchanok Sanmuang
Philip Nathan

2ND BAAL Corpus Linguistics SIG Symposium 2016
Practical applications of regular expressions
Coventry University, 10 December
  • Miloš Jakubíček (Sketch Engine),
  • John Williams (Portsmouth University)
  • Andrea Nini (University of Manchester)
  • John Blake (University of Aizu)
What uses can corpus linguists make of regular expressions in pre-processing texts, composing more powerful queries, or elsewhere? This BAAL Corpus Linguistics SIG event, building on the successful Corpus Symposium held at Aston University in May 2016, aims to answer this question and provide helpful guidance to corpus linguists who want to know more about these important and powerful tools. The programme includes presentations by John Williams on the use of regular expressions in the pre-processing  of texts,  Miloš Jakubíček on Sketch Engine, Andrea Nini on his Multidimensional Analysis Tagger and John Blake on the pedagogic application of regular expressions.
Links to slides and other materials kindly provided by the speakers: Link to report of event


BAAL Corpus Linguistics SIG Symposium 2016
Software and programming in corpus linguistics from novice to expert: to script or not to script? A BAAL SIG Symposium in honour of Adam Kilgarriff
Confirmed Speakers
  • Jack Grieve (Aston University)
  • Susan Hunston (University of Birmingham)
  • Ramesh Krishnamurthy (Aston University)
  • Garry Plappert (Aston University)
  • Paul Rayson (Lancaster University)
  • Mike Scott (Aston University)
  • Paul Thompson (University of Birmingham)
Does a corpus linguist need to be a computer programmer? What are the current range of options for the ‘non-scripting’ corpus linguist? How can the corpus linguistics community best support those with little or no programming skills? The BAAL Corpus Linguistics SIG is holding a one-day conference on Friday May 6th at Aston University, Birmingham, in honour of Adam Kilgarriff. The programme will be comprised of a series of invited talks on the theme of software and programming in Corpus Linguistics, and is intended to provoke a lively and informative discussion around these topics. We welcome attendees at all levels of practice though it is anticipated that the day will be of most use to those actively engaged with corpus methods in their own work.

2nd BAAL Corpus Linguistics SIG Event 2015
Corpus linguistics and the study of style: methods, findings, applications
  • Date: 23 March 2015 (Monday)
  • Time: 10:30am to 5:00pm
  • Venue: George Eliot Building, Department of English and Languages, Coventry University
  • Guest speaker: Dr. William Louw (University of Zimbabwe)
From the early period of linguistic computing to the present day, at least five distinct roles for corpora in stylistics can be identified.
  • The corpus as a collection of a writer's literary works
  • The search for direct matches between literary works and reference corpora  (see e.g Louw 1991 in Classroom Concordancing,  T. Johns and P. King eds.)
  • Approaches involving the co-selection of vocabulary leading to Contextual Prosodic Theory (see e.g. www.revue-texto.net/docannexe/file/124/louw_prosodie.pdf)
  • The exploration of intuitively derived theories, including Hallidayan aspects, within corpora (see e.g. L. Jeffries and D. McIntyre (2010) Stylistics)
  • The exploration of  subtextual primacy vested in logico-grammatical collocates, extracted from corpora whose provenance is not necessarily literary (see e.g.www.corpora.phil.spbu.ru/Works2011/Milojkovic_47.pdf)  
William Louw, the originator of the concept of semantic prosody, will give the opening talk entitled 'Trust the subtext: Recent advances in Corpus Stylistics'.
We invite proposals for presentations to make up the programme for the rest of the day. These can be on any aspect of corpus linguistics and the study of style, literary or non-literary, with reference to methods, findings, or possible applications.

BAAL Corpus Linguistics SIG Workshop 2015
Statistics in Corpus Linguistics
  • Date: 20 February 2015 (Friday)
  • Time: 10:30am to 5:00pm
  • Venue: School of Education, University of Stirling
  • Guest speaker: Dr. Vaclav Brezina (CASS, Lancaster University)
This workshop is a practical introduction to the statistical procedures that can be used for analysis of linguistic data compiled into language corpora. It offers an overview of the main procedures used in the field of corpus linguistics together with simple examples of application of these methods. The following topics will be covered:
  • basic statistical principles;
  • descriptive and inferential statistics;
  • null hypothesis significance testing and effect sizes;
  • frequency and dispersion;
  • word association measures;
  • statistics in corpus-based sociolinguistics.
The workshop does not require any prior knowledge of statistics. It will be of interest to anyone who wants to use statistics to explore language corpora.

BAAL Corpus Linguistics SIG Workshop 2014
An introduction to advanced corpus visualization tools
December 6th 2014
Hosted by the Department of English and Languages, Coventry University, with Chris Culy,http://linguistics.chrisculy.net/sfs/index.html
The goal of this workshop was to introduce advanced visualization tools for corpora and language data, tools which can be useful additions to existing techniques for exploration and discovery.
The workshop consisted of three parts:
  • some examples of what advanced visualizations currently exist
  • an overview of what makes a successful visualization, based on visualization principles
  • a hands-on session with a few specific tools that you can try.
No programming skills were needed. Sample texts and corpora were provided, but participants were encouraged to bring their own data as well.
Resources used during the Workshop:http://linguistics.chrisculy.net/resources/2014_BAAL_Workshop/index.html

BAAL Corpus Linguistics SIG Symposium 2013
Building and Mining Small Specialised Corpora
Hosted by the Moray House School of Education, University of Edinburgh
22 February 2013
This was a one-day event which took place at the University of Edinburgh on February 22nd 2013. It included nine talks from the following speakers who work with small specialised corpora:
  • Wendy Andersen (Glasgow)
  • Mike Handford (Birmingham, Japan)
  • Karen Corrigan (Newcastle)
  • Andrew Hardie (Lancaster)
  • Marion Winters (Edinburgh)
  • Joan Cutting (Edinburgh)
  • Dawn Knight (Newcastle)
  • Ken Fordyce (Edinburgh)
  • Bróna Murphy (Edinburgh)​