+++ Apologies for cross-postings +++

 

*Call for Papers*

 

ICE Corpora in the Age of AI. Pre-conference workshop @ ICAME 47

 

The International Copus of English (ICE) project, founded in 1990 (Greenbaum 
1996, Greenbaum & Nelson 1996), has been a tremendous success: 15 ICE corpora 
of Englishes around the world have been completed to date and numerous articles 
on the use and structures of varieties of English have been published on 
findings generated by these corpora. What role do the ICE corpora play today, 
35 years after their conception? On the one hand, 35 years after their 
conception, ICE corpora are increasingly being criticised as being too small, 
using an outdated data format and being difficult to handle for automatic 
analyses. Moreover, those ICE corpora collected 20 years ago may be considered 
outdated or at least not representing the contemporary use of the respective 
variety of English anymore (e.g. Botha & Bernaisch 2025). More generally, the 
original design, to some extent modeled on contexts of use applying to Great 
Britain, turned out not to match the reality of all varieties of English. On 
the other hand, ICE corpora have been shown to still constitute excellent 
sources for research on varieties of English even in comparison with big data 
(Loureiro-Porto 2017). In particular, coverage of a range of spoken and written 
registers sets the ICE corpora apart from more recent corpora. By the same 
token, some ICE corpora have been updated and extended to include modern data 
formats as well as new annotations (e.g., Conrad et al. 2025, Gut & Fuchs 2017, 
Schützler et al. 2017, Kallen & Kirk 2012, Wong et al. 2011, Wunder et al. 
2010). 

This workshop addresses the question of what role ICE corpora can play in the 
age of AI: Do they still constitute a good source for research, especially 
compared to the mega corpora of online data? How can they be updated for easier 
processing? How can new ICE cropora be collected using AI methods such as 
Whisper for the automatic transcription of spoken data? Should they be 
increased in size? Should new text categories be added and/or the original 
corpus design be revised? How can we be sure not to include texts generated by 
AI?

The workshop is intended to bring together people involved in the (i) 
compilation, (ii) computational handling and (iii) use of the International 
Corpus of English. 

 

We invite submissions of abstracts addressing perspectives in compiling, 
computationally handling and using the International Corpus of English in the 
age of AI. Abstracts should be between 400 and 500 words (excluding 
references), using the ICAME format <https://wp.uni-koblenz.de/icame47/cfp/>, 
and should be sent to the workshop organisers by December 10 2025. 

 

Organisers

Ulrike Gut, Universität Münster

Stella Neumann, RWTH Aachen University

Gerold Schneider, Universität Zürich

 

Conference website 

https://wp.uni-koblenz.de/icame47/

 

References

Botha, W., & Bernaisch, T. (2025). World Englishes and sociolinguistic 
variation. World Englishes, 44, 2–11. DOI: 10.1111/weng.12695

Conrad, S., Neumann, S., Frenken, F., & Schneider, G. (2025). Updating the 
international corpus of English for the 21st century: Towards a standardized 
XML-compliant markup. Corpus Linguistics 2025 Book of Abstracts, 74.

Gut, U., & Fuchs, R. (2017). Exploring speaker fluency with phonologically 
annotated ICE corpora. World Englishes, 36, 387–403.

Greenbaum, S. (1996). Comparing English Worldwide. Oxford University Press. 

Greenbaum, S., & Nelson, G. (1996). The International Corpus of English (ICE) 
project. World Englishes, 15, 3–15.

Kallen, J. & Kirk, J. (2012). SPICE-Ireland: A User’s Guide. 
https://johnmkirk.etinu.net/johnmkirk/documents/003648.pdf

Loureiro-Porto, L. (2017). ICE vs GloWbE: Big data and corpus compilation. 
World Englishes, 36, 448–70. DOI: 10.1111/weng.12281

Schützler, O., Gut, U., & Fuchs, R. (2017). New perspectives on Scottish 
Standard English. Introducing the Scottish component of the International 
Corpus of English. In S. Hancil & J. Beal (Eds.), Perspectives on Northern 
Englishes (pp. 273–301). De Gruyter Mouton.

Wong, D., Cassidy, S., & Peters, P. (2011). Updating the ICE annotation system: 
Tagging, parsing and validation. Corpora, 6(2), 115–144. 
https://doi.org/10.3366/cor.2011.0009

Wunder, E.-M., Voormann, H., & Gut, U. (2010). The ICE Nigeria corpus project: 
Creating an open, rich and accurate corpus. ICAME Journal, 34, 78–88.

 

 

Prof. Dr. Stella Neumann

Anglistische Sprachwissenschaft

 

RWTH Aachen University

Institut für Anglistik

Zi. 101

Kármánstr. 17/19

D-52062 Aachen

 

Tel. +49 (0)241 80-96105

 

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