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 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 compatability among the component corpora, each team is following a common corpus design, as well as a common scheme for grammatical annotation.

The annual ICE Workshop was held in Cebu, The Philippines, on 21 October 2009. The programme is here; progress reports and a report on the round-table discussion will be available soon.

The ICELite Project has now been successfully completed, thanks to funding from the Arts Faculty, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. A report on the project was presented during the ICE Workshop in Cebu, and is available here.

Dr Gabriel Ozon has joined the project as our consultant on the tagging and parsing of ICE corpora. Gabriel worked at the Survey of English Usage, UCL, on the DCPSE corpus, as well as on other projects. All queries relating to the tagging & parsing of ICE corpora should be sent to Gabriel at g.ozon@ucl.ac.uk

I am very pleased to welcome a new member to the ICE project: ICE Namibia will be directed by Dr Sarala Krishnamurthy, Polytechnic of Namibia.

The ICE Jamaica corpus is now available to download under licence from this site.

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: gnelson@arts.cuhk.edu.hk geraldnelson@asia.com Fax: +852 2603 5270