International Corpus of English (ICE) Homepage @ ICE-corpora.net

The International Corpus of English (ICE) began in 1990 with the primary aim of collecting material for comparative studies of English worldwide. Twenty-four research teams around the world are preparing electronic corpora of their own national or regional variety of English. Each ICE corpus consists of one million words of spoken and written English produced after 1989. For most participating countries, the ICE project is stimulating the first systematic investigation of the national variety. To ensure compatibility among the component corpora, each team is following a common corpus design, as well as a common scheme for grammatical annotation.

I am very pleased to announce the launch of ICE Uganda. The project is directed by Prof. Dr. Christiane Meierkord at Ruhr-University of Bochum, Germany.

The tagging of all currently available ICE corpora with CLAWS7 and the USAS semantic tagger is now complete. The tagged corpora will be made available to the academic community soon.

The tagged corpora are: Hong Kong, Philippines, Singapore, India, Jamaica, New Zealand, Great Britain, East Africa, Canada, and Ireland.

The ICE project wishes to thank Dr Paul Rayson, Director of the UCREL research centre at Lancaster University, for his generous cooperation in this initiative.

The ICE Ireland corpus is now available for academic research. Also available is ICE Ireland: A User's Guide, by Dr John Kirk (Belfast) and Dr Jeffrey Kallen (Dublin). For more information, see the ICE Ireland website.

Contact information: Professor Gerald Nelson, Department of English, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong SAR. Email: geraldanelson@gmail.com Fax: +852 2603 5270